Sector: Public Administration

The MEF DSII Living Lab

In early 2018, the Directorate for Information Systems and Innovation (DSII) of the General Administration, Human Resources and Services department of the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) established through the Cloudify NoiPA financing a Living Lab (LL), also known as an Experience Centre at the MEF premises. Distinct from other Living Labs, the MEF DSII LL is driven by the public sector. It is operated by the public sector for the public sector. Although users are invited to co-create solutions, ultimately and intentionally, the public sector remains the primary beneficiary. The strategic aims of the MEF LL are in alignment with the Institution’s key objectives. Therefore, the Living Lab does not abide to set operational rules and its administrators are keen to explore potentially disruptive applications. The MEF LL employs a multi-methodological approach that is output oriented. It has flexible objectives that evolve to meet its changing needs. Since its recent inception, the MEF LL has produced tangible results by acting as a platform and co-creation space to facilitate:

  1. A co-creation space facilitating multi-stakeholders collaboration and knowledge sharing;
  2. Used as experimentation and usability tests to bolster digital innovation;

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

The users that are invited to participate in activities at the MEF DSII LL have different profiles and demographic backgrounds. The answer to the question of “who” are the end-users in the co-creation session varies according to the session’s objectives. The users, or customers, with different qualifications are included in the innovation processes based on their suitability to achieve the expected output. The MEF DSII LL utilizes the personas approach to profile the main distinctive features of the LL session participants. Regulatory and compliance, contract law, and technical/IT experts combined with the end user groups are some of the categories which are commonly involved in test experiments. The role and involvement of the users at the MEF DSII Living Lab is understood both as reactive informants as well as active co-creators (Dell’Era & Landoni, 2014). In the first use case (1), the users were involved in the MEF LL for implementation of top-down experiments, which are centered on the users and place users as the object of study. The MEF DSII ran a series of usability tests where the objective was to understand how a system should be used in order to produce optimal results. Different end users were asked: “Can you make sense of the tool? Did you experience any issues? Are there improvements needed for a user-friendly designed solution”? The project workers observed use of the products, identified problems and solutions with the engineers, and thought of ways to utilize different functionalities and properties of the IT system being studied. This methodology at the MEF DSII has proved successful when a technology/service relying on user feedback and acceptance has been tested. In such an occurrence, the MEF Living Lab allows collection, filtration, and transfer of all valuable end user ideas to the developers. In other co-creation sessions (2) stakeholders are called upon to participate in an interactive and empowering way, enabling them to become co-creators, and to go beyond user-centered approaches that only passively involve users. Partners are therefore identified with important consideration of active user involvement in order to determine who should be involved in the different innovation stages. Users, or customers, with different qualifications are included in the co-creation processes based on their suitability to achieve the expected output.

Co-creation process

The MEF LL approach strives for mutually beneficial outcomes based on the different project objectives. Overall, co-creation is understood as a form of 1) needs investigation and 2) as a tool to enhance productivity and stakeholder buy-in. MEF DSII LL’s focus is to have a physical location to invite other stakeholders and to support co-creation innovation. Co-creation activities are undertaken at the exploratory stage, where it is important to identify the needs and the “current state” of stakeholder interest as well as the operational background context. A preferred option to understand user needs is to prepare co-creation activities based on established definitions and understanding of the users and what they represent. This exercise translates into the definition of personas. These are fictional characters that represent specific types of customers. For instance, a persona could be “Marc – IT supplier.” Marc has a background in IT software development, has certain predefined personal and professional needs, he is introverted but has strong analytical skills. Persona examples are created based on preliminary investigation of the themes and common characteristics of the people that will take part of the co-creation sessions. This involves research to produce an overview of the current habits and practices of the targeted users. After understanding the user characteristics, one then engages in the process of discovering the latent needs and wants of the user. A specific focus is placed on the current problems they routinely face, taking into account the specific situations in which these problems occur. Here, sensitizing techniques are used to delve deeper into the users’ levels of knowledge – uncovering tacit and inherent needs and wants. This leads to the development of opportunities for the improvement of the users’ ‘current state.’ These materialize in possible ‘future states’ and originate from collective brainstorming, ideation, and co-creation techniques. Co-creation at the MEF DSII is also understood in terms of productivity. Despite the perception that deliberate and open discussion among all stakeholders may be time consuming, the real productivity gains resulting from co-creation exercises validate these nuanced methodologies.  During and after the co-creation sessions, there were positive outcomes from multi-stakeholder engagement. In fact, it became clear that the discussions organized inside the LL were settled faster and more smoothly simply by giving the opportunity to all the participants to work in a common space during a fix set of time.

Digital Transformation Process

To provide an example, in use case n° 1 of the Living Lab as a co-creation space facilitating multi-stakeholders collaboration and knowledge sharing we detail out the operations and outcomes of the Living Lab within the so-called “Cloudify NoiPA” project. The MEF DSII is undertaking a large project that, by 2020, aims to expand the number of public organisations it services to cover the entire Italian public administration staff. It is then paramount to involve the end users, which in this case are the other public organisations that currently depend on the payroll and HR services or are expected to do so in the near future, in the design process. The MEF DSII launched a series of multi-stakeholder co-creation sessions to collect their input. The involved participants were decision-makers from other public institutions (for example, representatives from the Italian police and the army). The goal was to collect their feedback on the functionality of the IT platform they use, including insight on what bugs, errors and other technological issues they would like to see improved and to better understand if their needs were being met. In this respect, the MEF DSII LL put into action a methodology for collecting user needs and produced a physical space that fostered different and varied forms of collaborative interaction to spur innovation. The overarching objective is to ensure that stakeholders from other public administrations buy into the programme. Ultimately, by strengthening their confidence in the process, stakeholders are more inclined to support the transformation programme throughout all phases of the “Cloudify NoiPA” project.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

The MEF DSII experiments in semi-real life context and tests its products to collect feedback about usability issues. To provide an example, the MEF DSII has forgone some usability tests in advance of the launch of its updated webpage portal. This portal, on top of sharing informative material to the constituents about the MEF DSII activities, has a specific webpage devoted to “self-provisioning” services. The ”self-provisioning” services are a type of delivery mode that allow the MEF DSII to enlarge the user base of its public administration “clients” in a cost efficient manner. The local and regional public administrations can select, configure, and start services themselves in a cloud environment where they have access to download software from the web portal. Self-provisioning allows users to have rapid access to a customized infrastructure through a self-service portal, thereby limiting installation and maintenance costs, and avoiding costly procedures for requesting and approving new software. Thus, seamless functionality of the portal is critical for incentivizing adoption of the services and the wider buy-in from targeted stakeholders. The MEF DSII carried out usability tests on the portal by inviting a representative set of users to surf the web portal in the “observation room” (pictured on the right). The test subjects were then provided with a personal computer and were requested to navigate the portal by performing a selection of given tasks. In doing so, the users interacted with the test moderator in a consistent and measureable manner. The front line staff employed the “speak aloud method,” advising the users to say out loud what he/she thought were the main obstacles when processing the tasks. This was intentionally used to prevent participants from taking a reflexive approach where they say what they think they are supposed to say rather than their first impression. In fact, by proctoring the usability test in the separate “observation room,” the MEF DSII designers were able to effectively record the natural feelings and reactions of the participants. The metrics used for the web-portal user navigation assessment were, 1) Efficiency, 2) Efficacy, 3) Satisfaction, 4) Learning ease, 5) Memorisation ease, and 6) Error management. Technical tinkering enabled users to diagnose and fix bugs and optimize the customer experience with assistance from engineers and frontline employees.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

Throughout the co-creation session, staff observed an initial resistance by the involved stakeholders when having to follow a certain structure and set of rules during discussions and negotiations. For some participants, embracing the discussion in a different way than conventional meeting styles made them hesitant, impatient, or dismissive. However, at the end of the co-creation session a collaborative behaviour emerged and participants gradually acted more like themselves. Seemingly less tangible, but still documented by participants during the co-creation session, was a heightened closeness with the other stakeholders. During the co-creation sessions users were more prone to finding a common ground with others and improved relationships proved to be a critical success factor. Ultimately, involvement and motivation in the process were both a pre-conditions to the co-creation session as well as a succeeding outcomes. Although involving users is only one factor among many that promotes co-creation in a LL, it is considered indispensable. Users at the MEF DSII LL were considered involved to the extent where their ideas were helping influence and develop others’ point of views. The success of such real-life collaboration, which aims to promote learning between different stakeholders, hinges on how the co-design process was orchestrated, facilitated, and managed.

Transferability & Replicability

The Living Lab is having an increasingly prominent role at the MEF DSII as Living Lab managers sponsor and promote its usage to external stakeholders. At the MEF DSII, front-end employees take over the role of coordinating the different groups of participants. They also establish and promote the emergence of close relationships between various participants. In this sense, MEF DSII Living Lab front-manager tasks and responsibilities go beyond the physical space of the Living Lab. Positive relationships outside of the lab preclude and guarantee successful co-creation sessions. For the MEF LL to be disruptive, strong alliances should be built with other stakeholders.

Success Factors

The public value and overall satisfaction generated from the MEF LL co-creation methodology is understood as a continuous and iterative value creation of services and products oriented for end users and prioritizes customer satisfaction. Initially a private consultancy provided co-designed and co-created solutions to the MEF DSII. In a context of contamination of approaches, the value seen in these methodologies in fulfilling customer satisfaction made the MEF DSII interested in establishing its own Living Lab at its own premises. This exemplifies the effect of contamination of approaches between private and public service offerings and delivery models crossing and blurring the differences. This is even more apparent in light of the shift, described in the New Public Management scientific literature, in how public services are increasingly inspired and managed according to private sector models. Public service providers are focusing on customer service and understand the centrality of the users as recipients of the services and holders of its public value.

Lessons learned

The Living Lab is having an increasingly prominent role at the MEF DSII as Living Lab managers sponsor and promote its usage to external stakeholders. At the MEF DSII, front-end employees take over the role of coordinating the different groups of participants. They also establish and promote the emergence of close relationships between various participants. In this sense, MEF DSII Living Lab front-manager tasks and responsibilities go beyond the physical space of the Living Lab. Positive relationships outside of the lab preclude and guarantee successful co-creation sessions. For the MEF LL to be disruptive, strong alliances should be built with other stakeholders. The facilitation of co-creation sessions requires competences which are highly contextual, anticipate the designer/manager needs and capabilities in stakeholder interactions and adjust to local settings. Due to the novelty of the MEF LL, there is still a need to hire a number of practitioners that possess the right skillsets in order to get the most out of the co-creation sessions. Attracting and retaining a broader range of practitioners that are trained in a varied set of methodologies such as co-design, co-implementation and co-assessment activities should be prioritized. Further, the stockpiling of institutional knowledge on User Research, Usability Testing, Design Thinking Workshop, Business Model Design, Change Management and Service Design is likely to produce skilfull judgments and facilitate meaningful interventions which are much needed.

The Spanish General Secretary for Digital Administration

The General Secretary for Digital Administration offers the best case study in Spain for approaching value co-creation in the field of digital transformation, as it is the digital service team from central government in charge of national leadership and coordination. Fourteen head of Units and project managers of some of the most relevant projects have been selected to share their experience and opinions regarding co-creation of value in their area. In particular, they have been asked about their organisation, the most relevant project in which they have worked, other actors involved in those projects, recurring challenges, involvement of public servants, citizens and other stakeholders in their projects, replication of practices across levels of government, public value creation and the future of digital transformation.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

Stakeholders and Beneficiaries include:
  • Civil servants
  • Other national, regional and local public administration
  • Associations, representatives and intermediaries
  • Citizens as final users and professionals
  • Businesses and third sector associations

Co-creation process

Civil servants, citizens, business, intermediaries and other stakeholders participate during the whole cycle of creation of value. For example, when thinking about the projects launched to create some of the most relevant services nowadays, it was clear that the voice of the large number of stakeholders was collected and taken into account. It is worth noting that direct participation is not the most relevant way of co-creating value, the role of the intermediaries and external evaluation plays a central role. The main barrier to involve citizens in the early stages of the development of a project is the lack of an interlocutor. The administration usually collaborates with citizens when they are part of an association or a civil society cluster. It is especially during the legislative reform and the evaluation phases that the opinion of citizens, public servants and other stakeholders is gathered and taken to the continual improvement process. Nonetheless, efforts have been done during the last years to create spaces for collaboration. For example, the current administrative laws include some steps in which collecting the opinion of stakeholders is a legal requirement for their publication. Also, formal groups have been created within the governance structure which meet often to share opinions regarding digital transformation. During the phase of evaluation, the feedback of the stakeholders is the main indicator of the success of the service. In the case of the coordination between different administrations and different administration levels, formal working groups with the participation of the CIOs and other managers are arranged and some of them are even regulated by law. This multiple structure of collaboration and cooperation is deemed necessary because of the complexity of the territorial model and of the administration.

Digital Transformation Process

The provision of digital public services in Spain involves multiple actors, different in their powers and interactions amongst them. Even though there is a basic legal framework that applies for all the national territory, there are different competencies that result in the fact that strategies, legislation and public services are not unique Spain. The Law 11/2007 recognised citizens’ right to use electronic means in their relations with public administration. Afterwards, two new administrative laws integrated eGovernment into its core. These established the citizens’ right to communicate via an electronic channel with the public administrations and the obligation of the public administrations to use electronic means in their communications. Alongside, it was created the figure of the CIO of the Public Administration of the State, in charge of promoting the digital transformation process and the coordination with other administrations and with the European Union, together with the General Secretary for Digital Administration. One example. A relevant success case about co-creating value in digital administration is in the selection of the non-working days for notifications in the Tax Agency. Citizens, businesses and the public administration are able to enjoy a complete vacation period without problems derived from failed notifications, with the corresponding improvement in management. The quality of the service of the Tax Agency has been improved when taking into account massive feedback from all stakeholders.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

  • Improvement of user-centricity, accessibility and quality of digital public services.
  • Satisfaction of the final user.
  • Reduction of the average time of processing of the administrative procedure.
  • Reduction of the development cost of the digital public services.
  • Reduction of fraud and increase of revenue.
  • Transparency and openness.
  • Better skills for digital transformation among civil servers and the civil society.
  • Improvement of knowledge about the public administration among citizens and other stakeholders.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

Interviewees identified an attitude of risk aversion among the public servants, as a consequence of fear to possible negative outcomes. Some interviewees declare that the coordination of a large number of stakeholders of different nature required a lot of effort, both with other administrations and with the private sector. Technical challenges have been identified, such as the use of some services by a large number of users complying with the requirements of availability, together with the digital divide, which complicated the adoption of some projects by all users and made it necessary to give several alternatives for the different groups of users. Other challenges are in changes in the direction of the project and varying degrees of support through time. It was also noted that the resistance to the projects was often against the way and the conditions of implementation and not against digital transformation. Starting the projects with quick-wins or clear advantages from the beginning can help to advantages and benefits to be noted from the beginning. In some of the more complex services, training and appropriate technological equipment has been necessary. It is needed an especial effort in training a deployment of technological equipment for its success. In the case of public servants who are involved in the design and operation of the projects, it is important to value and reward the whole team in the case of success, so that they feel co-responsible in future digital transformation projects. It has been identified in the surveys that the resistance to change among civil servants and ICT experts often comes from previous projects which were not successful.

Transferability & Replicability

There is a culture of cooperation and coordination among administrations, implemented through technical committees and working groups with representatives from the state administration, the regions and the municipalities. In the surveys, all of the interviewees from the Digital Secretariat for Public Administration declared that the source code of the digital services they were responsible for was published. Cloud computing is particularly relevant, as it allows this segment of users to access services without the need of meeting specific requirements in terms of infrastructure, budget or human resources. The current model is usually based on offering the service on the cloud to the final administrative user without a payment, as a policy to increase the use of digital services among small administrations. This model was preferred by most of the interviewees. The Law 39/2015, of the Common Administrative Procedure, establishes that regional administrations must reuse the common digital services unless otherwise justified in terms of efficiency. This helps the smaller municipalities to adopt digital transformation services, being usability crucial for the success of the project.

Success Factors

  • Participation of stakeholders should avoid one-size-fits-all strategies; idiosyncrasy matters and as well as the nature of the service, project, sector and type of users.
  • Prioritisation is essential as well as fast interactions along the value co-creation life cycle.
  • Moving from service offering model to on-demand model.
  • Key issues for involvement of stakeholders: dedication, selection, competences, awareness.
  • Less bureaucracy, direct on-line relationships and closeness to the citizens and other stakeholders.
  • Starting the projects with quick-wins or clear advantages from the beginning, so the advantages and benefits can be noted from the beginning.
  • In the case of public servants who are involved in the design and operation of the projects, it is important to value and reward the whole team in the case of success, so that they feel co-responsible in future digital transformation projects.

Lessons learned

The main conclusion of this report is that co-creation of value is a reality in the public sector of Spain. Direct participation is not the most relevant way of co-creating value, the role of the intermediaries and external evaluation plays a central role. Statistics of use as an indicator of the success and importance of a digital public service are regarded as a central piece. This study has identified some challenges regarding co-creation of value. It is necessary to improve the digital skills of citizens and other stakeholders in order to encourage their participation in the creation of value in digital transformation. It was identified that some of the services are not known by some of the segments of potential users and this reduces the success of the project. The organisation of the different stakeholders, their dedication and implication in the administrative affairs is very unequal and for that reason the co-creation of value could favour some stakeholders against others. It was declared by most of the interviewees that an improvement of the digital skills of the Spanish society would help to increase the quality introduced in the projects by the external stakeholders. It was a general opinion collected in the interviews that, by working further on the topic of co-creation of value, public administration will be able not only to be transparent and improve their accountability, but it will be possible to deliver services of a higher quality, user centric and which give a better response to the necessities of the society.

PwC Experience Centre

Development and technological innovation are changing the way people live and especially work. Progressively, end users/consumers are becoming vital in the design of modern service/product delivery models – particularly in the public sector. In 2015, to accommodate this shift, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) launched its first Experience Center in Hallandale, FL to serve as a space where collaborative, dynamic, and user-oriented business models could be developed and tested – ultimately helping bring together diverse stakeholders for innovative, multi-perspective solutions. Since 2015, PwC expanded its Experience Center unit and now employs 3,000 people across 50 Centers and 5 key European hubs to support private and public industry as they evolve to meet the changing needs of their customers. At their core, the PwC Experience Centers promote iterative, user-centric problem solving strategies and their staff facilitate essential and transformative client interactions throughout project design stages. The Centers function as independent intermediaries where PwC can reach non-traditional clientele and experiment with participatory design processes. Further, its operations are dual-purposed as PwC Experience Center staff advises internally and externally – supporting PwC consultants while also offering services to outside clientele. PwC advances several initiatives at its Experience Centers including, application of Design Thinking in workshop settings, product/service usability testing for clients, and trainings for how to implement the Centers’ agile and responsive on-demand approaches. In addition to consulting on local projects across sectors, the PwC Experience Centers allow critical exchange of information and produce crosscutting connections, thereby enabling an innovative PwC-wide network of service offerings. PwC’s Experience Center unit uniquely incorporates lean and flexible methodologies and navigates organizational barriers often faced by larger well-established consultancy firms. Importantly, PwC constructed the Centers as adaptable and open multiuse workspaces staffed with employees from mixed, unconventional backgrounds to ensure client access to distinct skillsets and multifaceted approaches. Through compilation of secondary research and primary interviews with PwC Experience Center staff, our case analysis provides an overview of the PwC Experience Center ecosystem while also taking an in-depth look at the typologies of services and products offered to public sector clients across the globe. We collected data from PwC Experience Center project reports and applied theoretical frameworks from literature on Living Labs – narrowing our scope to their use by private firms for the public sector. The analysis will focus particularly on how, insofar, the spaces have helped these clients transform their business models, test new technologies, and develop solutions during PwC guided co-creation workshops. Part of our research also delves into the impact of the BXT (Business, Experience, Technology) mindset and the subsequent application of PwC’s Service Design for Growth approach in product/service delivery. Specific examples and use-cases will be included to highlight and compare how the Centers proliferate private-public partnerships and assist in the implementation of co-creation methodologies at the local and macro levels.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

Apart from PricewaterhouseCoopers, beneficiaries include public administrations involved in specific projects such as the Lombardy Region.  

Co-creation process

Uptake of co-creation by private companies is a relatively recent trend, spurred by increased connectivity, technological innovation, and prioritization of user experiences. A recent report from Hitachi Europe found that “58 per cent of businesses have piloted co-creation projects to help them innovate.” More rapid communication between customers and service providers has altered the typical business relationship and thus PwC Experience Centers are becoming critical for facilitating co-creation and producing viable solutions for public sector clients. At the Experience Centers, PwC builds business approaches and methodologies based on their BXT mentality – which recognizes the interconnectedness of Business, Experience, and Technology. It places the human experience at the center of business and technological transformation – ultimately drawing on multiple perspectives and disciplines in development processes. Summarily, the BXT mindset evaluates proposed solutions holistically and stresses the importance of collaborative approaches, building around questions such as; is the solution useable? Is the solution useful? Does the solution work? The Centers’ application of a BXT-minded Service Design for Growth model and its associated co-creation processes help PwC remain adaptable and adjust services to meet specific client demands. The Service Design for Growth model is comprised of four key stages: 1) Exploration, 2) Strategy, 3) Co-Creation, and 4) Growth and focuses on impact and growth delivery. For each design stage, the PwC team introduces exercises to gain clearer understanding, define the service through synthesis of research, generate solutions, and transpose the principles of open-innovation and collaboration in clients’ everyday business. However, different from the sequential and rigid Stage-Gate approach, the process remains Agile in design and replicates the Design>Test>Iterate steps until outcomes are approved by all actors. A final ‘rapid prototype’ is the expected output, which PwC underlines as “cheaply, easily, and quickly changeable.” This method is user-oriented – meaning it is human centric rather than a top-down process – and Co-Creation sessions allow PwC staff to bring together stakeholders in product/service conceptualization to secure equal investment and widespread of the project. PwC also importantly valorizes incremental innovation, focusing on the small deliverables and touch points throughout the design process. At the Experience Centers, PwC teams move clients through the co-creation process that consists of two pre-project phases, Discovery and Session Design, then the Co-Creation Session itself, and lastly is followed by two post-session activities, De-brief and Deliverable Realization. Co-creation sessions can last anywhere from 1-5 days, depending on the client’s request, and are customized to meet specified objectives. The flexible and iterative nature of the co-creation methodologies at the Centers also allows for bi-directional learning. PwC benefits from leading co-creation sessions by refining their own approaches and learning what works with clients and clients revise their own business models to match consumer demands. Applying co-creation approaches brings new knowledge to the firm while also attracting forward thinking clientele. To better understand the specific exercises used in each design stage, we will analyze the use of co-creation sessions and Design Thinking by the PwC Experience Center in Milan, Italy in the Portal for the Lombardy Region project. In July, the PwC Milan Experience Center hosted a collective group including representatives from Regione Lombardia, business and test users, service managers, and other relevant administrative personnel. The participants were selected based on their wide range of backgrounds and intentionally included portal end-users. From the beginning, the co-creation session objective was clearly defined and the following goal was shared with participants: How can we help the project back office (Lombardy Municipality administrators) to operate smoothly to support users in a simple and immediate accession of the project? PwC staff then provided an overview of Design Thinking methodologies and the Design Sprint approach, which aim to promote a multidisciplinary vision, are human-centric, and ultimately deliver solutions in a time efficient manner. PwC staff divided the group into two sub groups, the citizens and the firm, and the groups were given a secret task that involved the user portal in order to initiate the service road mapping exercises. In the mapping process, there was emphasis placed on asking ‘why’ behind each problem solving statement to help uncover what the root issues were for the service providers and consumers. Giving each group a persona with specific user characteristics helped participants develop mutual understanding for the needs of the user portal and the challenges faced by firms developing the products. Further, PwC bases proto-personas used in the exercises on real data and market research to guarantee that the alignment in communication resulting from the session is applicable in a real world setting. After discussing the frustrations and needs of each persona in their groups, participants played a word association game where they could role-play and discover their overlapping concerns. Next, in the analysis phase, participants identified the various touch points for the portal services and discovered where there were issues within the service delivery model. Lastly, they worked together to generate solutions for how to enhance communication between stakeholders and improve the operational flow from a “What I Need From You” perspective. Overall, in the Lombardy Portal use case, the Experience Center’s co-creation session was instrumental for bringing together stakeholders using an all-inclusive approach and for creating an innovative, user-friendly service/product delivery model. The final output was a new ready-to-use portal for standardization in resolving of public works issues and improved assistance for Lombardy residents. The role of front-end employees/public service staff in co-creation. In co-creation sessions, front-end employees are essential for facilitating and guiding participant interactions. At PwC Experience Centers, there are two main types of employees working with external clients. The first group, are the creative specialists (digital engineers, industrial designers, UX technicians) that bring clients’ visions to fruition. The second group, are the facilitators of the co-creation sessions. The PwC staff in the facilitator roles are extensively trained in facilitator methodology and are well experienced at bringing together different perspectives in collaborative design thinking. Critically, the plurality of employees’ job profiles at the Centers allows for creativity in services offerings and guarantees that various types of clients will have the necessary personnel to execute the co-creation session objectives. To quote a Senior Manager at the Rome Experience Center referencing the value of staffing Centers with a variety of skillsets “the team (PwC) must be ready to support the different projects in every moment.” As aforementioned, the PwC staff act also in a ‘meta-consulting’ capacity – sharing information with and teaching internal PwC consultants. The normal managing consultancy team structures are not applicable to PwC Experience Center project teams. Instead, the front-end employees play dual roles as they are also actively participating in the co-creation process and the member composition is distinct from the usual partner, manager, senior associate, and junior associate team format. This is vital for co-creation to remain focused on the user and decentralized in structure. Additionally, the PwC Experience staff are tasked with procuring transformative interactions between stakeholders and ensuring that solutions from sessions are participant driven. This function is divergent from a typical PwC-client relationship, which can be less iterative and more unidirectional. The role of users/citizens in co-creation As noted in the section on how co-creation is outlived, co-creation prioritizes users/citizens at every stage and incorporates participatory design thinking. One of the main priorities of co-creation is iteration – allowing for user feedback and touch points throughout the development process. PwC considers customers/users/citizens as co-designers and their involvement is critical for avoiding product-centric outcomes and replication of past implementation mistakes. Part of PwC’s intermediary role is to relay the value of active user involvement to clientele, including public organizations and governments contracting the Centers’ services. This is executed through PwC’s creation of user and provider ‘personas,’ which helps cluster common characteristics and fosters mutual understanding among participants. Users/citizens need to feel a sense of commonality amongst themselves and development of personas also reveals universal concerns, frustrations, and challenges that were previously unacknowledged. There are several examples where PwC Experience Centers engaged multi-stakeholders and served as platforms where users/citizens could express their needs and wants of certain products/services. In the Lombardy case, for instance, in addition to the co-creation session PwC helped organize a call-for-feedback session, where Lombardy citizens were able to submit their opinions on the new public portal. Through this process, the Regione Lombardia could collect responses and better understand the fundamental issues of the application based on the user experiences. Another example, the Meet Sweden project pioneered by the PwC Stockholm Experience Center in partnership Swedish Industrial Design Foundation (SVID) and Swedish public agencies, highlights how the public sector is growing increasingly interested in the role of users/citizens in service model development. Asylum seekers in Sweden often struggle with long and arduous processes when trying to resettle and legally immigrate to Sweden. Information is lost between multiple visits to disjointed public organizations and refugees does not feel in control of their own asylum journey. To remedy some of these issues, PwC Stockholm brought together private and public actors as well as the migrants themselves at the Experience Center to participate in co-creation sessions and generate human-centric solutions. Assessing the needs of the migrants was essential when developing the layout and in-app design features in the Meet Sweden mobile application. As a result, the participants jointly created a new mobile application that streamlines the asylum process and saves time, money, and energy of all involved actors. This is just one project where livelihoods were improved based on co-creation design thinking and it exposes the potentialities of Experience Centers in enhancing public service delivery models. The role of other stakeholders (private actors, communities) in co-creation Given the Service Design for Growth delivery model’s emphasis on multi-stakeholder engagement, other private actors and the community at-large are valuable contributors, especially in co-creation sessions. Community stakeholder groups and private actors are active in participatory design thinking exercises in order to keep the target focus group, end users, at the core of solutions. Becoming representatives and managers of the public services/products instills important leadership characteristics in participants and ultimately facilitates self-governed, sustainable organizational processes.

Digital Transformation Process

PwC Experience Centers’ principal objective is to bring together customers and businesses in dynamic spaces to establish business models that incorporate user feedback at all design stages. In occupying this intermediatory role, Experience Centers help identify user needs and the root causes of customer dissatisfaction through co-creation processes so the resulting business model used by the client satisfies needs of end-users. This open-innovation environment attracts private companies and public organizations looking to modernize and transform the business-consumer service delivery relationship. Their human-centric nature makes these spaces distinct and helps concentrate varied perspectives and problem solving tactics in a central meeting location. Overall, PwC builds its Centers’ objectives around four key pillars:
  • Customer: placing the user at the center of the design process
  • Power of perspective: incorporating multiple perspectives in solutions
  • Always in Beta: maintaining iterative solutions that can be adjusted
  • Experiment with tech: enhancing existing tech and/or brainstorming new uses
    • Through iterative activities at the Centers, including group brainstorming in the Sandbox rooms, usability tests of company products and design thinking exercises, PwC works jointly with the public sector, its providers and the citizens to develop approaches that align with the above pillars. PwC intentionally outfits each Experience Center with adjustable, client-friendly workspaces and focuses on developing efficient and agile solutions. While Centers in every country belonging to the PwC network abide to a shared set of methodologies and approaches, each has its own focus and peculiarities. PwC structures each physical space differently to match regional and cultural characteristics. One example is the PwC Rome Experience Center. Inside the Center, there are flexible spaces with adjustable walls and moveable tables to accommodate activities organized for and with clients. It has a work café with objects of Italian design to create a familiar environment conducive to make people unwind and spur a positive ideation and reflection process. Additionally, the interactive technology and writeable walls incorporated in the central Sandbox meeting room offer clients unique spaces for meetings, workshops, and trainings with PwC UX design and technology professionals. The Testing Lab and Observatory Room include a unidirectional mirror so clients can carry out usability tests and observe real time client reactions to services/products. The Rome Experience Center also has AI technology, 3D printing, and contemporary digital programming to collaborate with clients in the development of prototypes. Typically, larger organizations have more rigid organizational hierarchies and learned cultural habits, which can make implementation of flexible methodologies difficult. The objective of the PwC Experience Centers are to function as testbeds and incubators for entrepreneurial design thinking and help PwC evaluate hybrid/agile managerial approaches to public sector challenges, in-house. By having the Centers operate in this way, PwC can overcome organizational challenges and share niche-consulting expertise gathered through Center activities to internal PwC consultants. This sort of ‘Agile Desk’ unit of PwC is transformative for internal work cultural – both enhancing workflow and teaching nuanced strategies for managing client relationships. There is a tri-fold benefit from PwC Experience Centers as clients, their customers, and PwC, learn and improve from the co-creation sessions and find solutions to broad, complex problems.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    Living Labs play a critical role in displaying the mutual value of co-creation approaches for public and private actors. In the public sector, there is a hesitancy to welcome consumer engagement throughout the service design process. Governments and public organizations are fearful that actively seeking consumer input is too cost and time intensive and are unaware of the potential benefits for engaging customers in the earlier design stages. Therefore, it is essential to understand the PwC Experience Centers’ role in helping enable public-private mutual understanding and fostering innovative co-creation solutions. They add value by acting as a platform for idea exchange between all actors, inciting and analyzing customer feedback, and promoting multi-perspective discourse. The resulting improvement in services and increase in public value benefit the supply-side and user-side equally, and substantiates the importance of intermediaries in opening communication channels. It enables organizations and companies to explore how to improve their own services and/or processes with consumer engagement as the central focus and at the Centers they can test, fail, retest, and optimize proposed strategies before actual implementation. Social learning and/or contamination of techniques/approaches during interactions at PwC Experience Centers is another key way that public value is realized. Social learning refers to two simultaneous, complementary, and intertwined processes: innofusion (Fleck, 1988) and domestication of technology (Sørensen, 1996). Fleck defines innofusion as the innovation that takes place during the diffusion of new technology amongst participants. In this phase, users discover their needs and wants through a process of technological design, trial, and exploration. The other component, domestication of technology, addresses the pre-existing “heterogeneous network of machines, systems, routines and culture.” Essentially, it recognizes how cultural consumption habits influence user behavior and underlines the value of incorporating users’ creativity in product design processes. For PwC Experience Centers, a transfer of co-creation approaches and design thinking techniques to its participants is valuable for ensuring sustainability of solutions and enabling shared sponsorship to anticipate possible resistance to project implementation. Additionally, there is a cross contamination of techniques between participants as they originate from diverse backgrounds and bring to the workshops different views for how to solve problems. In this process, divergence in ideas and incorporation of distinct actors allows critical knowledge transfer that often precludes innovation and helps identify overlapping challenges. Outcomes generated from co-creation activities at the Centers have included the use of private sector business models by public organizations. By seeing the design elements of private sector models implemented by PwC, clients can interpret and apply similar structures in their own operations – thus initiating a transfer of proven strategies between private and public actors. The ability to measure performance varies from center to center, as there is not a standardized system of analysis at the macro level. At the above-mentioned PwC Stockholm Experience Center, they have begun testing ways to assess the effectiveness of their products/services in terms of end user impact. Labeled as a ‘creative audit,’ PwC Stockholm staff retroactively analyzed their work in the past year. The criteria used to measure impact were developed around questions such as “How many end users have we reached?” and “How many lives have improved as a result of innovative business and service models?” There is a distinction in how PwC aims to measure the performance of Experience Centers against the broader PwC mission, which has traditionally been more concerned with client value. The underlying driver for evaluation is improvement of end user experiences rather than profitability and other conventional business metrics. While still in its early stages, the results from the Swedish case to a certain extent validate the value of PwC Experience Centers as innovation incubators. In addition, external organizations and other Living Labs are also looking to collaborate with PwC to actively monitor the impact of co-creation in their respective sectors. Based in Norway, the Asker Welfare Lab, a citizen engagement lab that “adopts an investment mind-set and treats citizens as co-investors,” has contracted PwC to help develop key performance indicators for the lab’s projects. They are working with PwC to develop a measurement model that, together with Norwegian Association of Local and Regional Authorities, can monitor outcomes and trace results of how the lab is driving innovation. The PwC Experience Centers’ role in measurement practices is still yet to be determined, but validating the Centers’ activities and helping other labs track their progress are chief priorities.

    Transferability & Replicability

    It is expected that such digital transformation practice could be replicated in other parts of the Italian public administration if the need and the will is there, since it is the same socio technical conditions that apply. Whether such digital transformation can be replicated in public organizations located in other national contexts depends on the way public administration is organized in such contexts as well as the level of digitalization of both businesses and society.

    Success Factors

    PwC Experience Centers strive to alter existing unidirectional service/product deliveries. In regards to the service experience for users, more specifically there are two principal focuses:
  • Become more human centered in solutions for problems through qualitative based research approaches and human insight
  • Produce agile and iterative ways of working that draw multiple perspectives and provide timely/efficient testing of concepts for enhancing user experiences
    • Theoretically, in applying these principles PwC can foster multidirectional and collaborative relationships between developers and consumers. Improving co-creation interactions has two potential effects for the customer: (1) It reduces transaction costs, risk, and uncertainty, and (2) it reduces the costs of the interaction for the consumer, which leads to greater satisfaction with and trust in the company (Rajah et al, 2008). These improvements for the customer are interlinked with enhanced productivity for the supplier and for the contracted firm (PwC in this case). In working with the end users throughout the co-creation process, subsequent organizational models used by clients reflect specificities of the customers and provide material for PwC Experience Staff to utilize in their role as meta-consultants to the firm. The resulting service experience/relationship is circular, valorizing iteration and human input in design. Clients and customers can walk away from experiences at the PwC Experience Centers with new levels of understanding and transparency, which then translates to sustained changes in business models and provider-customer relationships. Uniquely, the Experience Centers allow PwC to diversify its approaches away from traditional Stage-Gate methods toward more Agile On-Demand approaches and this has also impacted the inside work culture at PwC. Stage-Gate is a methodology where the project is divided into separate phases and the manager leads the continuation of the process. Developed to avoid reworking or redirecting processes, the Stage-Gate model remains limited in its ability to incorporate external feedback and in its dynamism. Amidst the digital revolution, Agile approaches emerged and gained traction as they were inherently more responsive and emphasized the role of people over processes. At PwC, the adoption of Agile methodologies by its Experience Centers has expanded and permeated across other business units and has attracted new and varied clientele. Further, through the Experience Center unit, PwC experiments with additional forms of flexible approaches and this has contributed to its successes in rapidly developing product/services that alleviate misalignments between the client and their customers.  In the public sector, transforming the service experience to be more human-centric is growing in popularity and in several cases PwC’s involvement has helped spur new private-public partnerships. Another use case from the PwC Stockholm Experience Center is the Storsthlm project. In response to Stockholm’s recent growth, the Greater Stockholm municipalities needed to reorganize management processes in the areas of politics and public administration. Together with PwC, the municipalities and the County Council collaborated on the Health and Support initiative as part of the new Regional Development Plan that aims to enhance citizens’ mobility and access to public resources. One aspect of the plan focused on improving public assistance programing for the aging population. Within the PwC co-creation sessions, outputs were constructed around a core objective: How can we make sure to deliver on helping citizens through the aging process? In working with the public municipalities, engaging with elderly citizens, and integrating co-creation methodologies, PwC helped keep the solution human centered and rooted in qualitative research. The municipalities reinvested in their citizens and relied on PwC business approaches to solve reoccurring issues in administering of public services. This resulted in improved interconnectivity between municipalities and a collaborative program design that moved away from typical silos and disjointed public assistance organizations in the public sector.

    The Living Lab of the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) – Directorate for Information Systems and Innovation (DSII)

    In early 2018, the Directorate for Information Systems and Innovation (DSII) of the General Administration, Human Resources and Services department of the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) established through the Cloudify NoiPA financing a Living Lab (LL), also known as an Experience Centre at the MEF premises. The following case study is based on a series of interviews with the Living Lab manager, involved stakeholders and surrounding observations on the Living Lab operations.

    The contextual elements of the MEF DSII’s institutional mandate provide the rationale for the understanding on the functioning of its Living Lab. The DSII MEF, has two main objectives; 1) To provide IT services to the MEF (and other non-DSII departments) and 2) To supply and manage HR and paycheck services to Italian civil servants. Through the NoiPA platform, which is the one of the largest payroll shared services center for public administration personnel in Europe, MEF currently issues over 2 million paychecks per month to corresponding public sector employees in over 100 public administrations. In the near future, according to the three year plan of the Agency for a Digital Italy (AgID) the MEF DSII goal is to expand its user base to cover all 3,3 million Italian civil servants from all 10,500 public administrations at all governance levels by using the NoiPA platform.

    To this end, it has to ensure a large buy-in from its “clients,” and the civil servants which are still unserved by the NoiPA platform. The Living Lab’s participatory approach and consensual decision-making models are outstanding principles for such an onboarding programme. Yet, Living Lab applications at the MEF DSII go beyond this, and since its inception the Experience Centre has been used in a variety of contexts and fulfilled several objectives.

    The MEF LL uniquely serves a dual purpose. It partially functions as an open innovation environment, where users participate in the creation of new services and products, yet it also hosts formal technological experiments to gage digital usage (i.e. staging test beds as real life settings for usability testing purposes). It covers a wide range of activities and rather than having a fixed objective and restricted set of methodologies, it aims at exploring different engagement modalities and different ways of putting the users at the core of the service design and implementation. The MEF LL has two physical rooms located at the MEF DSII headquarter in Piazza Dalmazia, Rome. It is comprised of a modular building system that can be adapted to accommodate different user preferences to ensure users can maximize the full potential of the space. Furniture, tables and dividers, can instantly create new spaces within a single room. The space is designed to have different types of meeting rooms for different uses such as large and small meetings rooms, brainstorming areas and prototype/testing rooms.

    Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

    The main stakeholders and beneficiaries include the ministry, and the 3,3 million Italian civil servants from all 10,500 public administrations.

    Co-creation process

    The MEF LL approach strives for mutually beneficial outcomes based on the different project objectives. Overall, co-creation is understood as a form of 1) needs investigation and 2) as a tool to enhance productivity and stakeholder buy-in. MEF DSII LL’s focus is to have a physical location to invite other stakeholders and to support co-creation innovation. Co-creation activities are undertaken at the exploratory stage, where it is important to identify the needs and the “current state” of stakeholder interest as well as the operational background context. A preferred option to understand user needs is to prepare co-creation activities based on established definitions and understanding of the users and what they represent. This exercise translates into the definition of personas. These are fictional characters that represent specific types of customers. For instance, a persona could be “Marc – IT supplier.” Marc has a background in IT software development, has certain predefined personal and professional needs, he is introverted but has strong analytical skills. Persona examples are created based on preliminary investigation of the themes and common characteristics of the people that will take part of the co-creation sessions. This involves research to produce an overview of the current habits and practices of the targeted users. After understanding the user characteristics, one then engages in the process of discovering the latent needs and wants of the user. A specific focus is placed on the current problems they routinely face, taking into account the specific situations in which these problems occur. Here, sensitizing techniques are used to delve deeper into the users’ levels of knowledge – uncovering tacit and inherent needs and wants. This leads to the development of opportunities for the improvement of the users’ ‘current state.’ These materialize in possible ‘future states’ and originate from collective brainstorming, ideation, and co-creation techniques. Co-creation at the MEF DSII is also understood in terms of productivity. Despite the perception that deliberate and open discussion among all stakeholders may be time consuming, the real productivity gains resulting from co-creation exercises validate these nuanced methodologies. During and after the co-creation sessions, there were positive outcomes from multi-stakeholder engagement. In fact, it became clear that the discussions organized inside the LL were settled faster and more smoothly simply by giving the opportunity to all the participants to work in a common space during a fix set of time. Co-creation is understood in terms of cost-efficiency. This is especially true in user-centric software design approach coupled with Agile and SCRUM methodologies. These spur the greatest benefits when they are undertaken in a conducive environment where cooperation between developer teams is facilitated. This is why Agile methodologies are synergetic with co-creation and participatory approaches, where developers can act preemptively by interacting with other teams and end users to step-by-step develop development IT systems – gradually building up the complexity of the solution over time and improving overall efficiency. The role of front-end employees/public service staff in co-creation The Living Lab is having an increasingly prominent role at the MEF DSII as Living Lab managers sponsor and promote its usage to external stakeholders. At the MEF DSII, front-end employees take over the role of coordinating the different groups of participants. They also establish and promote the emergence of close relationships between various participants. In this sense, MEF DSII Living Lab front-manager tasks and responsibilities go beyond the physical space of the Living Lab. Positive relationships outside of the lab preclude and guarantee successful co-creation sessions. For the MEF LL to be disruptive, strong alliances should be built with other stakeholders.The facilitation of co-creation sessions requires competences which are highly contextual, anticipate the designer/manager needs and capabilities in stakeholder interactions and adjust to local settings. Due to the novelty of the MEF LL, there is still a need to hire a number of practitioners that possess the right skillsets in order to get the most out of the co-creation sessions. Attracting and retaining a broader range of practitioners that are trained in a varied set of methodologies such as co-design, co-implementation and co-assessment activities should be prioritized. Further, the stockpiling of institutional knowledge on User Research, Usability Testing, Design Thinking Workshop, Business Model Design, Change Management and Service Design is likely to produce skillful judgments and facilitate meaningful interventions which are much needed. The role of users in co-creation The users that are invited to participate in activities at the MEF DSII LL have different profiles and demographic backgrounds. The answer to the question of “who” are the end-users in the co-creation session varies according to the session’s objectives. The users, or customers, with different qualifications are included in the innovation processes based on their suitability to achieve the expected output. The MEF DSII LL utilizes the personas approach to profile the main distinctive features of the LL session participants. Regulatory and compliance, contract law, and technical/IT experts combined with the end user groups are some of the categories which are commonly involved in test experiments. The role and involvement of the users at the MEF DSII Living Lab is understood both as reactive informants as well as active co-creators (Dell’Era & Landoni, 2014). The Living Lab of the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) DSII In the first use case, the users were involved in the MEF LL for implementation of top-down experiments, which are centered on the users and place users as the object of study. The MEF DSII ran a series of usability tests where the objective was to understand how a system should be used in order to produce optimal results. Different end users were asked: “Can you make sense of the tool? Did you experience any issues? Are there improvements needed for a user-friendly designed solution”? The project workers observed use of the products, identified problems and solutions with the engineers, and thought of ways to utilize different functionalities and properties of the IT system being studied. This methodology at the MEF DSII has proved successful when a technology/service relying on user feedback and acceptance has been tested. In such an occurrence, the MEF Living Lab allows collection, filtration, and transfer of all valuable end user ideas to the developers. In other co-creation sessions stakeholders are called upon to participate in an interactive and empowering way, enabling them to become co-creators, and to go beyond user-centered approaches that only passively involve users. Partners are therefore identified with important consideration of active user involvement in order to determine who should be involved in the different innovation stages. Users, or customers, with different qualifications are included in the co-creation processes based on their suitability to achieve the expected output.

    Digital Transformation Process

    Distinct from other Living Labs, the MEF DSII LL is driven by the public sector. It is operated by the public sector for the public sector. Although users are invited to co-create solutions, ultimately and intentionally, the public sector remains the primary beneficiary. The strategic aims of the MEF LL are in alignment with the Institution’s key objectives. Therefore, the Living Lab does not abide to set operational The Living Lab of the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) DSII rules and its administrators are keen to explore potentially disruptive applications. The MEF LL employs a multi-methodological approach that is output oriented. It has flexible objectives that evolve to meet its changing needs. Since its recent inception, the MEF LL has produced tangible results by acting as a platform and co-creation space to facilitate:
  • A co-creation space facilitating multi-stakeholders collaboration and knowledge sharing;
  • Used as experimentation and usability tests to bolster digital innovation;
    • To provide an example, in use case n° 1 we detail out the operations and outcomes of the Living Lab within the so-called “Cloudify NoiPA” project. The MEF DSII is undertaking a large project that, by 2020, aims to expand the number of public organisations it services to cover the entire Italian public administration staff. It is then paramount to involve the end users, which in this case are the other public organisations that currently depend on the payroll and HR services or are expected to do so in the near future, in the design process. The MEF DSII launched a series of multi-stakeholder co-creation sessions to collect their input. The involved participants were decision-makers from other public institutions (for example, representatives from the Italian police and the army). The goal was to collect their feedback on the functionality of the IT platform they use, including insight on what bugs, errors and other technological issues they would like to see improved and to better understand if their needs were being met. In this respect, the MEF DSII LL put into action a methodology for collecting user needs and produced a physical space that fostered different and varied forms of collaborative interaction to spur innovation. The overarching objective is to ensure that stakeholders from other public administrations buy into the programme. Ultimately, by strengthening their confidence in the process, stakeholders are more inclined to support the transformation programme throughout all phases of the “Cloudify NoiPA” project. Another example of the Experience centre functioning as a space that facilitates multi-stakeholder collaboration and innovation was the participatory re-design of the MEF DSII’s new organizational model –much needed initiative to support its service expansion. Rather than making the organizational re-design a purely top-down management decision, the process extensively used and prioritized a co-creation approach. As part of the project, the design team invited around 50 MEF and Sogei top figures to a co-design session at the Experience Centre (picture on the left). Each participant was asked to share their ‘Loves’ and ‘Loathes’ of several pre-identified critical processes and was tasked with proposing their own preferred to-be organizational model by drawing a diagram with the office responsibilities and target processes. The participants were clustered in 7 groups and asked to agree upon a common a to-be organizational model for the group. In this stage, the list of 50 organisational models was reduced to 7 potential options. Afterwards the 7 organisational diagrams were displayed at the living lab during an “Expo” day (picture below) and the employees that did not attend the co-design session were invited to visit the “Expo” to discuss the models with project owners, share ideas, and provide input. This two-way communication ensured implementation of both top-down and bottom-up decision-making. It eventually resulted in the final selection of the preferred to-be organizational model of the MEF DSII. The highly participatory approach enabled by the Experience Centre environment and related co-creation methodologies guaranteed an avenue for the entire Ministerial staff that would be affected by the organizational change to express their design preferences. Ultimately, this can ensure a higher adaptability and success rate in the subsequent phase of transition plan implementation. Additionally, the MEF DSII experiments in semi-real life context and tests its products to collect feedback about usability issues. To provide an example, the MEF DSII has forgone some usability tests in advance of the launch of its updated webpage portal. This portal, on top of sharing informative material to the constituents about the MEF DSII activities, has a specific webpage devoted to “self-provisioning” services. The ”self-provisioning” services are a type of delivery mode that allow the MEF DSII to enlarge the user base of its public administration “clients” in a cost efficient manner. The local and regional public administrations can select, configure, and start services themselves in a cloud environment where they have access to download software from the web portal. Self-provisioning allows users to have rapid access to a customized infrastructure through a self-service portal, thereby limiting installation and maintenance costs, and avoiding costly procedures for requesting and approving new software. Thus, seamless functionality of the portal is critical for incentivizing adoption of the services and the wider buy-in from targeted stakeholders. The MEF DSII carried out usability tests on the portal by inviting a representative set of users to surf the web portal in the “observation room” (pictured on the right). The test subjects were then provided with a personal computer and were requested to navigate the portal by performing a selection of given tasks. In doing so, the users interacted with the test moderator in a consistent and measureable manner. The front line staff employed the “speak aloud method,” advising the users to say out loud what he/she thought were the main obstacles when processing the tasks. This was intentionally used to prevent participants from taking a reflexive approach where they say what they think they are supposed to say rather than their first impression. In fact, by proctoring the usability test in the separate “observation room,” the MEF DSII designers were able to effectively record the natural feelings and reactions of the participants. The metrics used for the web-portal user navigation assessment were, 1) Efficiency, 2) Efficacy, 3) Satisfaction, 4) Learning ease, 5) Memorisation ease, and 6) Error management. Technical tinkering enabled users to diagnose and fix bugs and optimize the customer experience with assistance from engineers and frontline employees.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    In 1995, Mark Moore, in his book Creating Public Value (Moore 1995), coined the term Public Value to encapsulate an essential difference between the public and the private sector. According to Moore, public value can be seen as the total societal value that cannot be monopolized by individuals, but is shared by all actors in society and is the outcome of all resource allocation decisions. This shift calls for a different understanding in how value is generated. At the MEF DSII LL, it was observed that value stems from cross-interactions and knowledge exchange produced in Living Lab sessions and what emerges as an outcome. In its role as a public IT and HR service provider the MEF DSII is expected to deliver services to other public organizations. In this context, when these organizations see themselves merely as a recipient of services, dissatisfaction and claims of non-usable services are more likely. The MEF LL bridges the divide between the provider and end users and helps circumvent issues by integrating the users (other public organizations) in the different product/service development stages. It promotes active user engagement and incorporates user-feedback in a variety of ways. In the above-mentioned example, it is the user-friendliness and intuitiveness of the portal that gives it value. The public value and overall satisfaction generated from the MEF LL co-creation methodology is understood as a continuous and iterative value creation of services and products oriented for end users and prioritizes customer satisfaction. Initially a private consultancy provided co-designed and co-created solutions to the MEF DSII. In a context of contamination of approaches, the value seen in these methodologies in fulfilling customer satisfaction made the MEF DSII interested in establishing its own Living Lab at its own premises. This exemplifies the effect of contamination of approaches between private and public service offerings and delivery models crossing and blurring the differences. This is even more apparent in light of the shift, described in the New Public Management scientific literature, in how public services are increasingly inspired and managed according to private sector models. Public service providers are focusing on customer service and understand the centrality of the users as recipients of the services and holders of its public value.

    Challenges & Bottlenecks

    Throughout the co-creation session, staff observed an initial resistance by the involved stakeholders when having to follow a certain structure and set of rules during discussions and negotiations. For some participants, embracing the discussion in a different way than conventional meeting styles made them hesitant, impatient, or dismissive. However, at the end of the co-creation session a collaborative behavior emerged and participants gradually acted more like themselves. Seemingly less tangible, but still documented by participants during the co-creation session, was a heightened closeness with the other stakeholders. During the co-creation sessions users were more prone to finding a common ground with others and improved relationships proved to be a critical success factor.

    Transferability & Replicability

    It is expected that such digital transformation practice could be replicated in other parts of the Italian public administration if the need and the will is there, since it is the same socio technical conditions that apply. Whether such digital transformation can be replicated in public organizations located in other national contexts depends on the way public administration is organized in such contexts as well as the level of digitalization of both businesses and society.

    Success Factors

    The MEF living lab is an avenue that promotes innovation – which is understood in two ways. Firstly, as what stands between the ‘current state’ and how things will be done (i.e. the ‘future state’) – encompassing a whole series of drivers such as technology, nuanced business models, and organisational restructuring in line with the Open Innovation paradigm. Secondly, as a disruption to the current way of thinking and acting through the exploration and usage of innovative technologies. The MEF DSII Living Lab innovation approach mirrors the principles of Open Innovation, which is the concept that in addition to its own internal research and development, the unit’s innovation is based on external ideas, resources, and competencies. Openness is crucial for the innovation processes of Living Labs due to the valuable role in the collecting of a multitude of perspectives which allows development of the most competitive and productive innovations possible. This paradigm is based on the belief that knowledge today is diffuse and distributed among various stakeholders and no organization, no matter it size and influence, can afford to innovate effectively on its own. It is critical for the MEF DSII to open its innovation procedures to the critical sources of knowledge that are the potential beneficiaries of their services. Open innovation facilitated by a certain usage of Living Labs, such as the MEF LL, is a step toward an innovation process that is increasingly shifting away from top-down approaches and promoting user-driven ecosystems. The second approach to innovation at the MEF DSII LL can be labelled as ‘experimentation.’ In the stage where a certain solution or ‘future state’ materializes into a proven concept, the building stages of developing and experimenting technology applications are validated. For instance the MEF DSII organized a Design Sprint workshop in its Living Lab to select a cost-efficient and valuable blockchain solution for the redesigning of MEF’s internal processes. The workshop methodology combined divergent and convergent thinking in order to address the business problem/s from different perspectives. This problem solving session led to the prototyping phase of a blockchain application to re-invent and innovate MEF DSII processes. This is only an example on how the MEF DSII Living Lab acts as an innovation method.

    Lessons learned

    Observation of the ongoing activities and results from the initial studies of the MEF DSII LL are encouraging. Several psychological and general considerations have been realized for the correct assessment of its service experience. Ultimately, involvement and motivation in the process were both a pre-conditions to the co-creation session as well as a succeeding outcomes. Although involving users is only one factor among many that promotes co-creation in a LL, it is considered indispensable. Users at the MEF DSII LL were considered involved to the extent where their ideas were helping influence and develop others’ point of views. The success of such real-life collaboration, which aims to promote learning between different stakeholders, hinges on how the co-design process was orchestrated, facilitated, and managed.

    The Saillysienne Fabrique: the Participatory Garden

    The “saillysienne Fabrique” (“La fabrique saillysienne”) was created at the beginning of 2017 aiming to set up projects proposed by the inhabitants, in order to improve the quality of life of the village. These cooperative projects have a general interest objective, and mainly have an environmental purpose. The objective of the fabrique is thus to modify the traditional methods of communication between elected officials and citizens.

    While the choice of projects was left completely open, the majority of the projects focused on themes combining cooperation and preservation of the environment. The Saillysienne Fabrique was launched in Sailly-Lez-Lannoy, a village situated in the department of Nord (Hauts-de-France), which had 1696 inhabitants in 2015.

    Currently, 11 projects have been selected. The projects are mainly environmental. The environmental objective is dominant in the following projects: Compost Workshop, Carpooling, Zero Waste Challenge, Participatory garden, Hives. In the other projects, the “social link” dimension is dominant, but environmental preservation can also be present, in particular through the idea of re-using resources. The other projects are the Book Boxes, Magazine Exchange, European Cycling Challenge, National Meetings of Participation, Film Debate, and Twinning.

    Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

    The categories of stakeholders of the Fabrique’s network are the following: A majority of Sailly-Lez-Lannoy inhabitants, a few other inhabitants from other villages, municipal councillors, municipal nursery and primary schools, professionals who periodically come to help the Fabrique’s workshops.

    Co-creation process

    The social innovation consists above all in the co-creation process between the inhabitants and the town hall. Citizen participation goes beyond the citizen debate, since citizens are experimenting by themselves the projects that they proposed. The innovation network of the participatory garden is made up of the town hall, citizens of Sailly-Lez-Lannoy, citizens of other neighbouring villages, and the schools of the village. Some professionals (associations, self-employed persons) are also involved in the Fabrique. Some of them have helped the inhabitants on a voluntary basis, others were compensated; some of them participated in several meetings, others intervened on an as-needed basis, according to the requests of the inhabitants.

    Digital Transformation Process

    This case study is not about a digital transformation process. The Saillysienne Fabrique is above all a “social innovation”: The Saillysienne Fabrique is presented by the people of the municipal council as a “means” to “accompany people who want to do something positive for the citizens”.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    The evaluation of the impacts of the Fabrique is difficult, especially since the project started in 2017 and is only at its beginning. However, several positive impacts have been identified. First of all, it has been noted that new inhabitants were attracted into the life of the village. All the inhabitants interviewed said they had met people they did not know, of a great diversity of ages, and whom they could never have met through their usual networks. In the case of the participatory garden, some participants felt that they did not know 80% of the people participating in the garden. In this sense, the town hall’s objective has been achieved. Second, new social links have been created. In the workshops, the creation of social ties is also evident through the exchanges that are established. The councilor noted that participation in the Fabrique is also a way for some people going through difficult times in their lives (health problems, divorce) to create or maintain social ties without having to talk about their personal background. The purpose of the Incredible Edible Community Garden is that the harvest is used by all people, allowing people who have financial problems to help themselves. In the case of the Sailly-Lez-Lannoy participatory garden, sharing the harvest is an objective but rather to make it enjoyable. As most of the inhabitants are wealthy, the garden was not designed with the aim of enabling poor people to find ways to survive. The project has also increased the visibility of the village. Sailly-Lez-Lannoy has been chosen for high-frequency carpooling.

    Challenges & Bottlenecks

    The interviewees do not identify any unavoidable barriers.  However, they pointed out the reluctance of some elected representatives concerning changes in the working methods, or the acceptance of power sharing. Other obstacles are more traditional, such as financial obstacles and lack of time. Implementing a participatory democracy method changes the working methods of the town hall, especially the decision-making process. The reluctance of some municipal councillors to share the decision-making process appeared at several stages of the project. Another common barrier is the financial constraints. Indeed, one of the environmental objectives is that the inhabitants manage to recover materials, pallets, seeds, from their networks of friends, or from sites of recycling, sharing of materials, in order to avoid buying them on the market and to respect the planet. However, other projects of the Fabrique require more funding, such as the Twinning project, and inhabitants are trying to obtain funding elsewhere. The town hall manages to have an operating budget. In villages with few inhabitants, budgets are dedicated to specific services, consequently, there is little room for manoeuvre to open new budgets, especially during the year. If the lack of time is one of the reasons why the elected representatives set up the Fabrique, the lack of time is also a barrier for the inhabitants. Some inhabitants have to leave the project for professional and family reasons, which could contribute, if they have specialities in the project, to endanger the existence of the workshop.

    Transferability & Replicability

    The municipality has in mind that this social innovation linked to the new form of co-creation of value between the inhabitants, professionals, and the town hall should be reproduced in other villages. The municipal councillor at the origin of the project believes that it is necessary to involve the inhabitants because in small municipalities, the councillors do not have the time to develop such projects. The Fabrique is the solution to allow the development of projects. Thus, several organisations have taken an interest in this Fabrique with the intention of duplicate this mode of collaboration: carpooling on the scale of the urban community of Lille.

    Success Factors

    The film “Tomorrow”, which illustrates local solutions to environmental, economic and social problems around the world, was a good starting point for a discussion on citizen participation. Also, If the mayor of the municipality had not so much agreed on the merits of this project, and had not brought this project to the municipal councillors, the project would not have been implemented. Moreover, the fact that the town hall is the initiator of this network gives credibility to citizen initiatives.   It seems obvious to all the participants in the Fabrique that the municipal councillor who launched the project is essential to the smooth running of the Fabrique. The fact of having an elected representative in the innovation network facilitates certain actions of the projects, because since the projects take place in public spaces. She also managed to obtain a small budget from the municipal budget. Moreover, she boosts the workshops by linking the different projects through the facebook site, by launching a doodle for people to get together, by reserving the wedding hall according to the meeting requirements of the inhabitants, as well as by finding professionals according to the demands of the inhabitants. The personality of the councillor, very dynamic, who unites the teams, who is very attentive, very much in the exchange, allowed the experiences to be quickly set up.   The Fabrique has attracted the interest of other stakeholders. This visibility makes it possible to attract other inhabitants and eventually to obtain other sources of financing.

    Lessons learned

    Elected representatives of small municipalities usually have a job in addition to their mission as elected representatives, and must manage family logistics. The involvement of the inhabitants is the only way to propose a greater number of projects. In addition, some projects are too expensive for the municipality. The size of the village (less than 2000 inhabitants) requires alternative ways to develop projects because the town hall has few human and financial resources. The municipal councillor at the origin of the project considers that today, the only way to develop collective projects in small villages is to co-create them with the inhabitants. Some projects are complex to set up, and elected representatives do not have the knowledge to implement certain projects. The involvement of a European diplomatic inhabitant made it possible to initiate this project. Through his job, this person has the necessary contacts to do so, as well as the competences.   Finally, the trio of experts, inhabitants and elected representatives is win-win-win relationship.

    Guadalinfo Living Lab

    Guadalinfo was set up in 2003 with the basic aim of providing public broadband access and ICT uptake to the whole region of Andalusia including the most remote areas. The initiative was implemented by the Service for Access to the Information Society within Andalusia’s Ministry of Innovation, Science and Enterprise and targeted, in particular, towns of less than 20,000 inhabitants and neighbourhoods located in the most under-populated and disadvantaged areas of Andalusia.

    Nevertheless, Guadalinfo greatly evolved from a digital literacy-based network to a powerful tool spurring social innovation and citizens´ empowerment, thus unleashing fruitful processes of co-creation. This shift, undertaken through the deployment of a new tool called Innycia, reinforces the pioneering role of Guadalinfo, the strong value as a network and the profound embeddedness in the Andalusian society. Its evolving nature as a social innovation tool involving quite interesting co-creation practices enables considering the 770 centres strictly as “living labs”.

    Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

    Citizens from towns of less than 20,000 inhabitants (10,000 inhabitants in the initial phase) and neighbourhoods located in the most under-populated and disadvantaged areas of Andalusia. As such, Guadalinfo was born to foster social cohesion and regional development by minimising both the urban-rural divide and the emergence of exclusion in processes of innovation.  The project is organised as a massive network with a strong degree of capillarity.

    Co-creation process

    Three different levels of co-creation can be emphasised: – Low co-creative content. Activities of this kind have to do with eAdministration procedures. Thus, in this level the basic aim of citizens when accessing a Guadalinfo centre is to be engaged in eAdministration procedures as users and being provided guidance on how to proceed with it. Co-creation in this case is almost negligible as the activity (and the outcome) is known and pre-defined – Medium co-creative content, where a training action is usually the “spark” to unleash co-creation practices. Good examples are those training actions of high technological & hands-on nature (e.g. robotics, 3D printing) where users co-create and co-innovate along with the local innovation agents and the other users. -High co-creative content. Here co-creation goes a step further, arising long-standing projects that were born or “incubated” in the living lab thanks to social innovation and collective intelligence. Usually co-design & co-production “shake hands”.

    Digital Transformation Process

    Guadalinfo was initially set up to close digital gaps and break down several barriers (i.e., technological, skills, etc.) and the centres were led by what was called an animator, in charge of bringing ICTs closer to people so as to ensure universal digital literacy.  Notwithstanding this, it greatly evolved from a digital literacy-based network to a powerful tool spurring social innovation and citizens´ empowerment, thus unleashing fruitful processes of co-creation.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    Quantitative and qualitative assessment of Guadalinfo policies was set up through a scoreboard of indicators In the Guadalinfo living lab themselves, an online internal monitoring tool has been used since the beginning of the initiative in 2004 and provides results indicators for every Guadalinfo centre, updated every month.   Furthermore, the Second Strategic Plan (2016-2020) contained a very robust monitoring and evaluation system that is organised under periodic reports (quarterly, biannual and annual). The reports include a portfolio of indicators measuring the degree of completion of every action. A particular action of the Second Strategic Plan (n. 2.2.3) is called “Living Lab” and is targeted at “boosting social innovation through cooperation, collaboration and citizenry participation in order to take up projects and initiatives”. Two specific outcome indicators, namely, “number of projects taken up”, and “level of satisfaction of users” have been designed to measure the real impact. Finally, within the realm of some specific projects, results indicators are aligned to some macro indicators coming from external sources to determine the real impact of the measure.

    Challenges & Bottlenecks

    In the past, a major challenge was to how to effectively turn into a powerful social innovation tool, as Guadalinfo has been traditionally associated to a tool aimed at providing digital literacy. Currently the major challenge is how to cope with such different needs and expectation from the citizens ‘side. Guadalinfo is a pervasive network of living labs and a great deal of coordination is a priority. Local innovation agents need to be properly skilled to meaningfully interpret and provide useful responses, giving rise to different co-creation layers.

    Transferability & Replicability

    Guadalinfo is a showcase of replicability, as the project is organised as a massive network with a strong degree of capillarity. As such, about 770 centres are operating throughout Andalusia. Guadalinfo network is mostly funded by Andalusia Regional Government (Junta de Andalucía), which provides 66.66% of total funds, whereas the eight Provincial Councils (Diputaciones Provinciales) provide the remaining 33.34%. As a conclusion, the network is 100% public owned, and it is managed by the Fernando de los Ríos Consortium (Consorcio Fernando de los Ríos), which in turn is owned by the Andalusia Regional Government (50%) and the eight Provincial Councils (the remaining 50%). The Consortium provides strategic support and guidance, network capabilities, technical equipment, training, projects and innovation.

    Success Factors

    Guadalinfo is perceived as an element of trust and confidence for Andalusian population. The presence of Guadalinfo is pervasive in Andalusia, in such a way that whatever ICT-project involving public bodies you may think of, Guadalinfo will be somehow engaged.   Local innovation agents play a crucial role in the effective and successful implementation of Guadalinfo activities and vision. Local innovation actors are the main drivers of co-creation, and three specific skills have been identified as especially relevant to unleash co-creation potential, namely:
    • Versatility: as the local innovation agent is trained in whatever digital competence is considered necessary (having the European competence framework as a backdrop), versatility seems paramount
    • Pedagogic skills: these are especially necessary to create the atmosphere of trust and reliability “made in Guadalinfo”.
    • Soft skills (e.g. self-confidence, active listening, problem-solving, etc).

    Lessons learned

    The importance of trust and reliability to explain Guadalinfo success. Guadalinfo has been able to become a relevant social innovation platform in such a way that a sound alignment between supply (Guadalinfo centres) and demand (users and citizens) does exist. By doing so, Guadalinfo is: a) Increasing regional innovation and entrepreneurship potential of all Andalusians; b) Having a knock-on effect for the economy and growth in Andalusia, especially in rural areas and depressed areas; c) Promoting local and regional culture so as to reinforce local identity, having a further positive impact on the wellbeing and the quality of life of the Andalusian population as a whole.