Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

Beneficiaries: Járókelő is the Hungarian translation for “passer-by”, it refers to any citizen who is walking by and can be able not only to see an urban problem or malfunction, but also to report it in an easy and efficient way. Other group of beneficiaries are the local governments and other service providers (e.g. public transport companies). Járókelő has now more than 40 volunteers, mainly from the younger generation. There are monthly meetings for the volunteer administrators/ case managers.The association developed a volunteer recruiting and selection process in 2018.

Co-creation process

Járókelő created a fully citizen-centric and community driven internet-based service to strengthen active citizenship, democratic participation, and improve urban management. Járókelő is a mediator between civilians and authorities, so basically it created a new process for collecting and sending complaints, which had an impact on the whole system of fixing street problems. The employees of local municipalities tend to use their map application on the jarokelo.hu website. There are some local governments that indicate jarokelo.hu for citizens as their official forum of reporting street problems.

Digital Transformation Process

The innovation Járókelő realized is complex and practice-based (bricolage). The solution included not only the internet platform, but a process design, knowledge base, marketing and organisational innovation. By its digital solution Járókelő partly substituted prior co-production practices as well as some of the functions of the public organisations. Technology can enable citizen engagement. Platforms like Járókelő and others are tools that can have a positive impact on strengthening democratic institutions, transparency, accountability and foster public participation in public life. Járókelő functions as a bridge between citizens and local authorities in the common need to solve immediate problems in the built environment. As most of the problems reported are easy to fix, local governments can easily give a positive response to citizens.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

Járókelő has grown considerably over the years since it started, nowadays it has reached around 20.000 visitors per month and registers 30 to 50 complaints per day in Budapest alone. Jarokelo has more than 9.000 registered users and more than 25.000 cases solved (as May 2019, approx. 2/3 of the reported cases are sold). Járókelő is often a „speeding lane”, so problem reporters experience quicker response. The positive experience encourages citizens to make further reports. Citizens monitor each other’s report, transparency is growing. The whole venture has not only grown in terms of the number of visits and reports but also in terms of the number of locations in Hungary such as Debrecen, Kecskemét, Veszprém, Szeged and Szentendre, cities that have joined the system. When the platform was launched, municipalities were unprepared for such an engagement, did not fully understand the platform and how it could be beneficial for them. As many of the municipalities lack the capacity of innovation to make their services more efficient and user-friendly, Járókelő can provide a platform that helps their work. Therefore, similarly to many other civic tech platforms, Járókelő can create a win-win scenario, building up trust between local governments and citizens, and improving public spaces. Nowadays Járókelő is more and more accepted as a trusted partner by public service providers.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

Creating the financial background of the association is the biggest risk ever since Járókelő is functioning. Financial resources come from donor organisations (for-profit companies). The Association can plan their budget and operation only year after year. There is a slight risk that the government may introduce a one-stop notification system regarding public complaints, and this way Járókelő could lose its mediator role between civilians and authorities. There is also a little risk, that thanks to technological developments the local governments will have more and more user friendly ways of communication, so Járókelő’s platform may be superfluous. There is also a risk of emerging competitors e.g. a Swedish company trading with crowdsourced online streetmaps. Cooperation with most local governments and public service providers is well-functioning, but cooperation with local authorities has not always been easy. In many cases, municipal offices have been reluctant to cooperate with Járókelő. It really depends on the actual place and the people working in these offices.

Transferability & Replicability

The system can easily adapt to other Hungarian cities. Járókelő plans to develop its system to other Hungarian cities as well, for this they would need other paid coordinators, who could keep the contact with the volunteer case managers on the countryside. So the plan is to increase incomes in order to be able to finance new full-time employees.

Success Factors

Institutional factor: obligation for co-production on part of the public organisations is coded in Act CLXV of 2013 (dealing with complains and public interest disclosures). Even though in Hungary the Act CLXV 2013 deals with complaints and public interest, each city and district deals with them in a different way because the regulations of how to deal with those issues are actually made locally. Járókelő has now more than 40 volunteers, mainly from the younger generation (between 16 and 43 years). They work as web developer and case manager. The volunteers are typically students, free-lancers, have jobs with flexible schedule.  The Association has a well-developed volunteer recruiting and selection process. The IT system is constantly developed and the website is easy-to-use.

Lessons learned

Digital technologies can substitute traditional co-production practices (e.g. remote monitoring or predictive algorithms). The platform of Járókelő provides an easy-to-use technology for citizens, where the reporting users can track and monitor the problem solving process. Furthermore digital technologies can eliminate public sector organisations from co-production (e.g. self-serving communities). The citizens do not need to know which organisation (local authority or a public service provider) is competent to solve a given problem. This knowledge is provided by the Járókelő.hu.

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.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

The transfer of the Living Lab from the countryside toward a metropole led to a new organization and the definition of 3 beneficiary targets. Erasme’s service offering is divided into three levels:
  • The first level concerns all digital projects carried by Lyon Metropole, with the Directorate of digital innovation and computer systems. Beneficiaries are the inhabitants that may be interested by a multiservice card or a better life in a smart city, for example.
  • The second level concerns diverse internal departments of Lyon Metropole for improving public services about child health, culture, transports, Public Service Houses, and so on.
  • The third level concerns the offer for external partners. It may be a municipality that seeks methodological support in the framework of a European programme. Or it may be private companies working for urban services, for example.
  • Co-creation process

    Since 1999, policy makers have imagined the Living Lab as a public service with a dedicated place and a team of experts in digital technologies at the service of local development. In this first stage (1999-2015), Erasme was used to work with museums (Muséolab programme) or teachers (ICT in education). When Erasme delocalized towards Lyon, in 2015, the Living Lab was at a mature stage with a strong experience. Since then, exhibitions are organized “outside the Lab” to mobilize inhabitants around some themes of public interest such as: culture, education, elder or poor people, smart city (urban regeneration, collective transport…). More than a Living Lab that mobilizes users to imagine new concepts or prototypes, Erasme claims to be a “Do Tank” to innovate and change urban life with digital technologies. The co-creation process is divided into two stages: the “Mix” and the “Lab”. This methodology has emerged from the long-term experience of the Living Lab since 1999.
  • The “Mix” is an event in which a specific place (museum, station, church, etc.) is “invested massively” by users for 2 or 3 days. It is a time to produce ideas and first prototypes but also a way for transforming organizations thanks to agile methods, collective intelligence and by creating contributive communities.
  • The “Lab” is a time for creating an innovative product or a digital service. Innovation requires a few weeks and sometimes several months for transforming prototypes into operational tools and services. Professional skills from diverse ecosystems are associated in neutral contexts and tests are realized in real life with end-users.
  • Digital Transformation Process

    Erasme Living Lab claims to be a “Use Laboratory” for the people and not a Lab dedicated to test digital technologies for new markets. Digital tools (software, device) are designed, prototyped, tested then developed in new technological device but to improve life of inhabitants in different public fields: culture, education, health, elderly, mobility and Smart City. The Living Lab mobilizes experts in culture and education but also in digital technologies, a mix of skills that creates a special alchemy to invent the museum of the future (Muséolab, Museomix, digital arts), digital workspaces for pupils, digital tools for aged people to keep in touch with their family, for example. The aim is to solve problems of inhabitants thanks to digital solutions but with a focus on public services, even if some innovations are developed with Start-ups or even with big firms of the region. More recently, Erasme Living Lab is working on the “SelfData project”, which makes it possible to invent services from citizens’ data while ensuring the security of the personal data beyond the requirements of the GDPR. Moreover, the “Grand Lyon Smart Data platform” (www.smartdata.grandlyon.com) makes it possible to co-create new urban services with users and private stakeholders. Lyon Metropole is also associated with the cities of Nantes and La Rochelle, in the west of France, to experiment the “Territorial SelfData”, a project launched with a national think tank called FING (New Generation Internet Federation) which is a leader in exploring the future of Internet and digital transition for people.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    Co-creation workshops deal with four themes of public interest, which produced some services or products.
  • Culture (since 20 years): recent digital technologies were tested such as RFID, e-paper, Ubicomputing, Tangible interfaces, with the help of digital artists, in particular for a science and society museum (Musée des Confluences at Lyon).
  • Education (since 20 years): ICT education then e-learning environment for primary and secondary schools. The ENT (digital work environment) is open to teachers, pupils and their parents. Enriched year after year, it became a digital platform (laclasse.com).
  • Seniors e-care (since 2005): A tool (Webnapperon) was prototyped and tested with the elderly in retirement homes for dependent people. Improved in 2011 in the framework of a European project to co-design with 15 users, a service called “Host-communication” was implemented with open source software to create a social network between the elderly, often alone and far from their family.
  • Services for people in social difficulty have been a new field of experimentation for Erasme since 2015: The aim was to rethink the “Public Service Houses” of the Metropole in particular to welcome foreigners who do not speak French and do not know their social rights.
  • Smart city is also a recent field of experimentation: All citizens are end-users that can test new products or services, such as mobility with public transports.
  • Challenges & Bottlenecks

    Challenges originated in the creation of Erasme Living Lab by political decision: in 1999, a Senator interested in ICT and Internet decided to create a place to foster digital tools in cultural and educational fields, in particular in the countryside (his electoral constituency), where innovations are scarce. The transfer of Erasme towards Lyon in 2015 was also a political decision, to invent a smarter urban life but also to create a new administration with common goals after the merge of Lyon Metropole and the Rhône Department whose missions were different. Bottlenecks are diverse. First of all, the Living Lab is a “service of missions” which has to find budget for/thanks to new projects each year. The budget instability is a problem to follow more and more projects with a small team of managers. Young researchers or experts are sometimes recruited with a fixed-term contract thanks to the ERDF funds or other national or regional project funds but skills and competencies disappeared at the end of the contract. The lack of budget and its instability are also a problem to create a dedicated place for the Living Lab. Even if mobile workshops in the city are a good solution to attract citizens to the experimentations, a dedicated place is necessary for the development and innovation stage when professionals from diverse ecosystems have to meet and share their competencies.

    Transferability & Replicability

    Diffusion of innovations is important for Erasme. For example, prototypes of the Muséolab were diffused in museums, even at an international scale. The table Museo Touch is commercialized by a private firm. In education, the digital platform laclasse.com is used by more and more educative institutions in France. As Erasme is the oldest Living Lab in France, the question of replicability is very important for the management team. As Erasme belongs to different networks, at a local, national or even European scale, the co-creation model called “the Mix” was experimented elsewhere. Moreover, the reputation of the Erasme team generates solicitations from other geographical areas, even from around the world for the ”Museum of the Future”. Internationally, Erasme is registered in networks such as the Arts Sciences Network, Enoll (in 2010) or EUROCITIES (from 2017). Nevertheless, as Erasme claims a value creation in the service of general interest, transferability of the co-creative approach (Mix, Lab) is not easy with economic ecosystems in the region. But the theme of Smart City opens the partnership to businesses even if big firms are not used to open innovation, open source or Creative Commons License. Once they agreed with these principles, big firms use Erasme as a training centre to co-creation methods for their own employees. Barriers to co-creation are step by step transformed in a way to diffuse co-creation methods in the economic ecosystem of Lyon urban region. The future creation of an “Augmented Third-Place for Urban Worlds” (Smart City, Smart Territory) by a collaboration with another Living Lab in Lyon (TUBÀ), the university and other institutions, is the result of the Erasme reputation acquired step by step since 20 years.

    Success Factors

    The success of Erasme Living Lab depends on diverse factors.
    • The management team is composed of engineers, designers, developers, makers who are familiar with open innovation methods, animation and project management. They share competencies with diverse creative and professional communities, all experts in a specific field (culture, education, technology, health…) at a local, regional or even national and international scales.
    • Established step by step during 20 years, the methodology of co-creation with users and stakeholders is proven: a first phase of “Mix” with users (from ideation to prototypes); a second phase of “Lab” with professionals and users (from prototypes to tests then development of an innovative product or service).
    • Education to the “right to fail” through a communication about “lessons from experience”. Because failures can be a source of value rather than a barrier to co-creation.
    • A Living Lab approach “out of the walls”, in public spaces with citizens rather than in a dedicated place, is a way to promote co-creation to the general public, digital artists or social innovators. But a dedicated place “as neutral as possible” is better for associating professional ecosystems such as big firms, creative start-ups or higher education institutions (design, digital coding, urban planning…).
    • Thanks to its 20 years of seniority, Erasme Living Lab is well identified by the metropolitan ecosystem, and even beyond the region.

    Lessons learned

    For the managers of Erasme, many Living Labs look more like Think Tanks. Erasme claims to be a “Do Tank” because the management team has the will to “make” without being so far a Fab Lab. Erasme is actually relying on existing Fab Labs to make some prototypes. End-users are invited to the co-creation process but at specific moments: 1) upstream in the ideation phase (one or two days) and the rapid prototyping phase (10 days); 2) downstream to test the prototypes. Between these two stages, time (several weeks even months) is given to private and public stakeholders for the development phase (further prototyping, tests, returns and iterations) of innovations that can be put on the market (diffusion phase). To be efficient during theses different stages, the Living Lab need a management team for maintaining a clear purpose (production of solutions and not only concepts and prototypes) and for offering a methodological accompaniment to users and stakeholders. But the respect of freedom in a “neutral” space or place is necessary in order to foster creativity, the emergence of disruptive ideas, and agility necessary for prototyping out of usual operating constraints. Paid professionals are a necessity to mobilize experts in the development phase, to be able to cross technical competences with artistic skills in dedicated domains (education, culture, health, smart city…). But the number of professionals have to be limited to maintain proximity among the stakeholders when it is necessary to obtain a consensus about the final product.

    Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

    The SIILAB was created by the DRJSCS and 15 other founders, from the social economy (association networks, social entrepreneurs networks, R&D institute for transfer of social innovations, a regional research and training chair), decentralised directorates from State services (social security, employment, housing, family allowances, environment, energy, social economy, statistics) and national public financial institutions. The Regional Directorate of Youth, Sports and Social Cohesion is the node of a larger network of public and private stakeholders that were used to work together but wished to improve their collaborative practices to create new solutions for digital and social inclusion. Beneficiaries are citizens that need social aids or at least inhabitants far from digital transformation of public services.

    Co-creation process

    The SIILAB charter sets out methods in order to «foster the emergence of territorial innovations (and) the evaluation of the impact of social innovations». The methodology follows 3 phases: 1) Co-design of public policies with users for their real needs ; 2) Prototyping and test of solutions; 3) Project development with agile methods. Specific tools inspired from design methodologies are used, such as «Lego games» as Icebreaker between people who come from diverse institutions with different professional mindsets. Other tools and co-creative methods are powered by the DITP (a governmental service for the transformation of administrations). A small team of managers and limited-term employees are in charge of co-creative workshops in a dedicated room equipped with mobile tables, large screens and software often forbidden in the French administration. The SIILAB team is beta-tester for these software, creates fact sheets for users and diffuses innovations on social medias. The SIILAB is a space which favours interactions between administrations and their stakeholders, that allows the “right to fail” and a collaborative work based on agility and a non-hierarchical organisation. Even if the stakeholders are first interested by the SIILAB to experiment new digital tools rather than creative methodologies, the Living Lab helps stakeholders to change their work habits to foster innovative projects.

    Digital Transformation Process

    The role of the SIILAB in the digital transformation is twofold: 1) exploring impacts of the administrative dematerialization on public agents and in particular on social workers in the region; 2) finding solutions for the digital inclusion of inhabitants whatever their social level and the territory where they live. Indeed, the national program Action 2022 aims at 100% administrative dematerialization in 2022 and at reducing the number of public officials: Internet has to become the main access to public services. But what will be the consequences in a region with a lot of inequalities? The SIILAB is a Living Lab for helping public agents with new digital practices, not only in the dematerialization of administrative requests but also to co-create new procedures beyond paper forms removal. Collaborative workshops were organised on the themes of end-users (digital vulnerability, reception in social centres), digital training of social workers or about authorised software (licences, security, hacking). To reduce the negative impacts of digital exclusion on fragile populations, the SIILAB designed and prototyped an interactive map of all social centres or other institutions than can help beneficiaries in their digital administrative requests. According to a Living Lab approach, a first inventory of local initiatives to improve the digital accessibility to public services was realised, by students of the university. A prototype of the map was invented in co-creative sessions, then tested on an “interactive table” in the SIILAB at Lille during the national «Week for Public Innovation» (2018). Accessible on the web, the interactive map constitutes a new public service against illectronism. An incremental updating of the map (800 places in 2018, 1500 places in June 2019) and user-returns about quality and accessibility are also a type of “evaluation in progress” of this new digital public service.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    The SIILAB is a tool for administrations to experiment new digital tools and work practices without the logic of signature books and with less political control than usual. As a public innovation Lab, the Lab managers are authorised to test disruptive rules for public procurement, such as the purchase of small equipment on the Amazon website or the use of a credit card. Thanks to the Living Lab, public agents can test online meetings or the national digital platform called “demarches-simplifiees.fr” (simplified processes) that helps public officials to co-product e-administration. As a Lab dedicated to social economy, social innovation and public innovation, the SIILAB is used by more than 150 public or private actors in the region. For transforming the SIILAB into “a network of networks”, the aim is to enlarge the audience of the Living Lab thanks to a mailing list of 1600 addresses (in 2019) of associations, local communities, State administrations, or through more than 1000 followers on Twitter. This social network is also used by the Lab managers to bypass the usual hierarchical communication with the ministries and elected people. Examples of outcomes are: a digital kit to train social workers in digital inclusion practices (access to social rights with Internet); a video prototype to explain «domiciliation in Social Centres»; an interactive map of places for digital inclusion not far from home (training, help of social workers to guide users in e-administration). The map has three aims: 1) helping inhabitants in their digital requests; 2) showing inequalities between citizens according to the territories where they live; 3) encouraging public authorities for improving the geographical diffusion of resource centres for e-administration.

    Challenges & Bottlenecks

    The SIILAB is a Public Innovation Lab managed by a State institution, the DRJSCS, under the authority of the Préfet (representative of the State authority in the regions). Even if a national call for project is a lever for public innovations, the change in administrative routines and the hierarchical top-down decisional process are real challenges. Another challenge linked to the call for project as a tool for public innovation is the short-term funding, too short to co-create with users and to prototype innovations. So, there is a gap between political discourses about co-creation and Living Labs (that need funds) and the national incentive for reducing public expenditure. According to the SIILAB experiments, a second bottleneck in transforming administrations is the digital process in itself. Cost, skills and data security can be barriers for the use of software in co-creative sessions with any public agent engaged in the digital transformation. And co-creation is not a priority when the digital transformation in public services implies more work to implement new software, new design and new rules (once only, easy to read and understand, etc.). Another barrier to the efficiency of Public Innovations Labs is that projects are based on partnership, too often based on engaged people but who could leave the experiment following changes in their careers.

    Transferability & Replicability

    The diffusion of the SIILAB experimentations is made by online social networks or through events “in the real world”, in the region or in France. From 2016, the SIILAB projected the scaling up of innovations at the regional scale, at the trans-border scale with Belgium and at a national scale through social economy networks. At a regional scale, the mapping of digital resource centres is a way of replicability in more and more local communities. At a national scale, other public innovations labs or social innovators come to visit the SIILAB in Lille in order to transfer some experiments. But considering the short time funding of the Living Lab, the uncertain future of the SIILAB makes it difficult to imagine the diffusion phase. Moreover, as a public innovation Lab created for the Hauts-de-France region, the SIILAB has no administrative authority to diffuse new public actions in other regions in France. These regions could just try to imitate the SIILAB, but probably in the limited framework of a call of project. A way to get around this obstacle was the participation of the SIILAB to the creation of a «Connected France Hub», a regional hub of public and private actors for digital inclusion (national call for projects from the “Bank of the Territories”). Linked to the national incentive for creating Living Labs in the public services, replicability of Public Innovation Labs as tools for administrative transformation goes also through a MOOC developed with the Sorbonne University in Paris to explain how to create a Public Innovation Lab.

    Success Factors

    For the government that launched projects for transformation of public action, the criteria of success are: cost-savings in public expenditure, a better quality of public services for users, a better work environment for public agents, an innovative digital project, the quality of governance. For the SIILAB, additional success factors are: an increased organisational performance, the learning of collaborative practices, a better implementation of public policies, new services for vulnerable people (poor, elderly, undergraduate, immigrants…). Moreover, SIILAB managers consider as a success the visibility of the social innovations by the Préfet (representative of the State in the regions) and by the government in Paris. Success criteria of the SIILAB were measured in 2019: more than 150 stakeholders; more than 3050 persons participated in 310 workshops or events (more than 200 participants in November 2018); 50 projects launched; 1600 persons in the mailing list; more than 1000 followers on Twitter and around 25 000 views per month; national prices as indicators of recognition and efficiency (Télécoms Innovation 2018, Best innovative strategy 2018). But a success factor to achieve these success criteria was the SIILAB capacity to reinforce the previous habits of decentralised State services to work together, as well as with the public and private actors of the social economy, including associations, universities and local authorities.

    Lessons learned

    The role of the SIILAB, as a Public Innovation Lab supported by the French Government, is to experiment digital tools and co-creative methods, often inspired from service design. Public Innovation Labs are elements of a national policy that aims to restore the legitimacy of public action by responding to three objectives: a social issue (linked to digital change), a budgetary issue (cost-savings), a governance issue (Public, Private, People Partnership). The specificity of the SIILAB is focused on social innovation and digital inclusion in a region where a lot of vulnerable people are far from e-administration. Its governance (a committee for strategic decisions, a self-organised partnership for actions, a regional networking) is one model among others in Public Innovation Labs. Introducing the Living Lab methodologies in a bureaucratic organisation allows the “right to fail” and new relations between State administrations, local public agents and private stakeholders (no subsidies but funds for a collective project). But some bottlenecks appeared through the SIILAB or other Public Innovation Labs: 1) co-creation with intermediate-users (public agents, associations) and not final vulnerable users; 2) when an innovative practice becomes a norm, it is more difficult to quantify how it changes public action; 3) it is difficult to evaluate the costs avoided by co-creation; 4) a short-term funding (2 or 3 years) does not allow to test innovations and change practices; 5) the Anglo-saxon model of «impact measurement» does not allow to evaluate the collective value creation (Commons).

    Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

    After the national government passed the law 39/2015, and most specially, due to its article 133, developing article 23 of the Spanish Constitution, any new norm in Spain is subject to public scrutiny by the citizens. Expanding this requirement, the municipality of Madrid embarked in a radically new form of citizens’ participation: the citizens’ jury or assembly or as they called it “The Observatory of the City”. This case explores this Observatory as a services design example aiming to capture the general interests of the citizenry of Madrid through the individual opinions of a permanent group of randomly selected citizens that meet regularly.

    Co-creation process

    This complex case is representative of two different levels of co-design of public services: 1) public and private agents got together to co-design the format of this citizens’ jury aiming at proposing public services and policy, mandatory for the government of the city; and 2) the jury’s members – 49 randomly-selected citizens – co-design public services and policy aided by city officials, outside experts and other citizens in working sessions, mediated by specially trained facilitators. We address both levels to enrich the view of this relevant case of value co-creation in the public sector.

    Digital Transformation Process

    Not applicable.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    The Observatory performs three functions: Analysing and approving – rejecting – the most voted citizen proposals for new services on the Decide Madrid participation digital platform; reviewing municipal decisions and public policies and suggesting related actions; and calling for public consultations and proposing any type of new public service or policy. Summarising the innovative outputs of the Observatory case, we identify the following:
    • “The city of Madrid had no experience in putting up a random, lottery-like selection and a deliberative process. It was through MediaLab and the involvement of NewDemocracy that both became real. Without the two processes, Decide Madrid would have stayed as the individual participation digital platform it already was.”
    • The stages of design and development of the Observatory probably have been innovative from day 0: The idea in the Area of Participation and how the team in the government formed; the design and prototyping in the Collective Intelligence for Democracy workshop and the interaction with the Area; the design of the logistics of the Observatory; the design and implementation of the facilitation of the sessions; and the processes the members of the Observatory are following to reach agreements. All have been examples of innovative processes and finally public services in Madrid.

    Challenges & Bottlenecks

    The main problems we identified in the set-up of the Observatory and work of the participants seem derived from a very initial stage of this municipal organ:
    • “As far as the operational part, the potential issue that we can see is the lack of diverse information for citizens to make decisions. We tend to think that the Council would give citizens just limited information from limited sources.”
    • “Another potential problem is related to the selection process: We have not seen a properly diverse room. In Australia, we diversify based on education level and things like earnings, but that was difficult in Madrid; they allocated quotas to certain parts of Madrid trying to cover the economic certification in the room. People who are more educated and better off are more inclined to participate in this process, and they tend to group together in the decisions.” Coincidentally, “after the first draw and election of the members of the Observatory, we realised that certain groups of people have voluntarily declined participation (blacks and other ethnic minorities). We have spotted people that are not feeling part of the city, and we would like to know if this is something we could facilitate. Being aware of the potential biases influencing the decisions, we in the municipality government needed to be trained in how to prevent them.”

    Transferability & Replicability

    We might highlight the following as the most transferable outcomes of the Observatory case when confronting the reality of collaboration with citizens for service design:
    • “After testing and validating our design methodology for experimentation, we have four big projects (ParticipaLab among them) that could have their autonomy and start an ecology or network of labs to reach a larger population and transform it. They could even propose new ideas and adapted methods.”
    • The most evident outcome of the processes described here is the Observatory itself – Madrid has now the first permanent citizens’ jury with the aim of reviewing citizens’ proposals, public policies and any topic they choose. “The process went really well. There was a confluence of interests and desires and they all fitted well (once in a lifetime this thing happens): from a prototype in a Lab, it went all the way to being implemented as a service development and public policy instrument. Some things we would have changed, but the final Observatory is part of a new way of negotiating by the public officials. Also, making it happen and in this short time was a big success. Ideally, this will continue and improve over time, since a design of this magnitude cannot have everything right from the outset.”
    • Other complementary outcomes, some more subtle, are related to the new relationships the government has established with the experimentation practices of MediaLab (Madrid’s government-owned living lab), the internal shortcuts they have designed to establish participation in the municipality, and the learning they have got from the actual jury meetings.

    Success Factors

    The complexity of the Observatory case is mostly based on its reach. As a complementary “chamber” to the elected members of the municipality council, the Observatory was made possible by merging several initiatives. As of January 2018, the Area of Participation began to work on a new regulation for the Observatory; in parallel, ParticipaLab (a living lab) began to collaborate with external experts in participatory processes and juries and co-designed the final draft of the Observatory. Both the design and the regulatory processes fed each other for several months. The co-design process, which had started with the Collective Intelligence for Democracy workshop (also a living lab) months earlier, concluded with the presentation of a final proposal or advice (https://www.newdemocracy.com.au/2018/11/15/the-city-of-madrid-citizens-council/) to the Area of Participation. It significantly influenced the final design of the Observatory (mostly, composition and times of the deliberation process). On January 29, 2019, the city council passed the new regulation and the new Observatory format had its legal framework as the first permanent deliberative chamber of citizen participants in any European local government – and definitely a pioneering experience worldwide. On the one hand, it regulated a lottery-elected citizens’ jury, with annual rotation. On the other, using a digital platform, it connected citizens’ initiatives for new services (collected through Decide Madrid) with citizens’ deliberative practices (the Observatory) which produces a double representation system for citizenry decision making. Complementary, the deliberations of the citizens’ jury are also connected with the entire population (through the Decide Madrid platform).

    Lessons learned

    Being this a complex project, with such relevance for the city and government of Madrid, we have experienced certain disconnections in the representatives of each agent we have talked to. Although everyone knew what the others were doing, their connections with the public agent were not always clear. The language barrier might play a role here, not only because of different actual languages, but because of different uses of the same language. A participatory process like the Observatory, both in the design and the operational parts, would initially be thought of as plagued with statistical assurances for getting the right quotas, segmentations, and the like. But it is not. The statistical significance is probably less relevant and what really matters is to have the right distribution of citizens that actually participate and show up for each session. The goal then is to avoid spontaneous groupings by economic or education achievements that can bias decisions. On the other side, there are no control groups to check whether the actual selection makes significantly different decisions than a proper statistical selection of citizens. An interesting point is the confusion of participating citizens. Probably, we must understand that we face different degrees of maturity or readiness in those willing to contribute through participation. A first stage might be participation as a means to have their voices heard – whether they are complaining, requesting or merely criticising; a second stage might be the realisation of participation as interaction with other peers, with equal voices but different intents; a third stage might be the confirmation of the need for consensus or agreement, which might imply knowledge acquisition, sharing, prioritising and decision-taking; a final fourth stage might be the setting of certain control tools and processes to ascertain their agreements are met and differences or deviations are understood and acted upon. It would be interesting to understand the transition from one stage to the other, as results certainly emerge in stages three and, specially, in fourth, and the time involved in maturing from the early stages to the latest.

    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.

    Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

    The main beneficiaries are the service users that receive follow-up services from the employment and welfare services. Consultancies providing design and programming expertise are involved stakeholders.

    Co-creation process

    A service design approach was explicitly adopted for the preliminary part of the project. In the project document, it was stated that the project ‘uses service design as a method to ensure a holistic approach in the development of new concepts. Service design is used throughout all phases of the preliminary project, with a continuous focus on the user’. Hence, a ‘holistic approach’ and ‘continuous focus on the user’ underpinned the service design approach. The project is anchored in qualitative and quantitative user research, and designers worked closely with frontline employees responsible for follow-up work in the development process.

    Digital Transformation Process

    The simplified follow-up project is closely connected to digital transformations in the organization. It is specifically interlinked with the introduction of a new system, called Modia, supporting new work methods in frontline work and digital interactions with clients. Moreover, the project was taking place in parallel to a broader organizational shift towards more agile methods for system development and organizational learning.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    The central results and outputs of the service design process in this case was the development of a digital activity plan with an integrated chat function for direct communication between councillors and users. The interactive functionality was enabled by broader system changes in the organization related to the introduction of the administrative system Modia, developed to support two-way interaction between users and councillors. There are indications that the new solutions are well received among frontline employees and users, and it seems generally perceived as an improvement to how service interactions and follow-up is being carried out. It is not possible to say whether these improvements have broader impacts regarding employment rates. Calculations of benefits realization were still ongoing at the time of the case study.

    Challenges & Bottlenecks

    The case highlights various potential dilemmas related to the use of service design for public service innovation. First, service design assumes open, creative innovation processes in which time is spent on deeply understanding the service and its ‘pain points’. At the same time, service design stresses the importance of iterations as central to the creative processes, which require a proposed solution that can be prototyped.  In this case, there was a concern that the main solution was launched too early, which somewhat closed the innovation process. It was reasoned that the result perhaps became less ‘revolutionizing’ than it could have been. Second, service design also underlines the importance of working both holistically and iteratively. The case shows how this can involve dilemmas in the sense that iterations may lead to a narrow focus on testing and improving specific solutions, in which the broader, holistic perspective of the services gets lost. Third, it was acknowledged that the insight work informing service design processes may run the risk of becoming detached from existing research knowledge.

    Transferability & Replicability

    The case can serve as inspiration for similar public service organizations seeking to digitalize service interactions, or to improve existing digital platforms for interaction with users. There are potential for learning from the service design approach underpinning the innovation process, and there are potential for learning and transferability when it comes to the concrete digital solutions that were developed and implemented.

    Success Factors

    Not relevant.

    Lessons learned

    There are valuable lessons to be learned from this project when it comes to efforts to rethink relations and interactions between public services and users in the context of labor and welfare services. These relations tend to be largely asymmetrical, and the users can feel inferior and alienated from the administrative processes of the public service organization. The outputs of this project (the digital activity plan and the chat for communication between users and frontline employees) challenge these asymmetries. The new solutions seem to provide platforms for improved interactions between employees in the welfare bureaucracy and users. The case shows that interactions through digital platforms can strengthen relations and interactions between service providers and users.

    Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

    A key stakeholder in a Danish context is the municipality, and more specifically the managers and employees at care centres and home care. The service of the bike ride cannot be outlived without these. Another key stakeholder is thus the politicians, who have been part of pushing the idea forward. Besides the public sector stakeholders, a key actor is the volunteers and the beneficiaries are the elderly.

    Co-creation process

    The idea and the service of getting a bike ride is not the outcome of co-creation, understood as deliberative innovation processes. Anyhow the idea has been developed and tailored to countries outside Denmark, where the public sector is not the main provider of elderly care.

    Digital Transformation Process

    CWA offers a digital booking platform, but the interviews revealed that for some care centres it was easier to use a manual calendar. And in the cases using the platform, it is not transforming practices and procedures.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    It is difficult to highlight specific results and outcomes of the bike ride in itself (see success criteria), but the success of CWA as a foundation and the many countries that now also offer bike rides for elderly can be seen as evidence for impact regarding the service/idea.

    Challenges & Bottlenecks

    The public managers stress that fiery souls are key when it comes to implementing the initiative – either positioned in the administration or within elderly care, and these need managerial back-up. Another barrier relates to the operation of CWA. The public managers tell how they are left alone with the initiative after the implementation phase. This experience is both related to the awareness from the municipality and from the CWA secretariat. To exemplify, it is the responsibility of the care centre/home care to maintain the trishaws and they are not granted any funding for repairing or buying new bicycles if they are damaged.

    Transferability & Replicability

    The initiative has been easily transferred to municipalities in Denmark and to other settings internationally.

    Success Factors

    The impact of the initiative  is not perceived by CWA and public managers in traditional quantitative metrics but rather in qualitative aspects, such as the general enhancement of the joy of life among the elderly. Another positive aspect of the visibility of the elderly in the local community is an increased awareness of elderly, dementia etc. among citizens in general. Still, CWA is working on more concrete evaluation criteria to professionalise and legitimise the bike ride as a method and an approach to increased life quality among the elderly.

    Lessons learned

    The case of CWA is interesting due to the high degree of positivity that surrounds the movement. The initiative and the foundation do not seem to meet a lot of resistance concerning the cause per se; to ensure that elderly stay mobile and part of society. Thus, it seems that if the cause is perceived highly legitimate the room for manoeuvre increases. Externally, since it becomes easier to engage in strategic collaborations and to recruit volunteers, and internally because the organization, based on trust in their own raison d’être and main objective, becomes flexible in regards to development and organizing, as long as the main objective stays the same. Another key aspect is how the innovation is positioned in the eco-system of public elderly care services. CWA is mainly an add-on to formal elderly care, since the foundation does not overtake tasks or roles of the public sector. In this manner they are not subject to competition regarding resources and legitimacy, making it less problematic for the municipalities to engage in collaboration.

    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.

    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.