Towards a co-creative approach to interactively develop digital services

Abstract

Numerous new service innovation methods and approaches have been established in recent decades, a lot of them emphasize the early involvement of the user perspective (e.g., in design thinking). However, there is still potential for further perspectives to be integrated into the service innovation process in a structured way, in particular to innovate inter-organisational with different stakeholders in order to incorporate different competences, knowledge and perspectives. Therefore, based on a literature review and an analysis of existing approaches, our work aims to develop a unified approach that enables the co-creative development of digital services by involving all relevant stakeholders (e.g., potential users, company representatives, experts, and business partners) in all development phases. The developed approach (consisting of three phases: Co-Exploration, Co-Innovation, Co-Evaluation) provides a structured yet modular and thus adaptable methodology that maps the entire innovation process of a digital service. Our research shows that the field of service innovation and user-centred methodologies is widely discussed, but the structured involvement of additional stakeholder groups is hardly recognised.

Keywords: Co, Creation, Service Innovation, Service Development, Service Engineering, Digital Services, Digitalization, Innovation

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1003131