Enabling a service co-creation and open innovation approach for empowered citizens

Giovanni Aiello1, Chiara Capizzi2, Filippo Giuffrida1, Ivan Ligotino2, Roberto Raccuglia1, Piersaverio Spinnato1, Antonino Sirchia1

1Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SpA, R&D Laboratory, Palermo – ITALY 2Demetrix Srl, Palermo – ITALY

Public administrations are facing key socioeconomic challenges such as demographic change, employment, mobility, security, environment and many others. Besides, citizens’ expectations, in terms of burden reduction, efficiency, and personalization, are growing and will make the take-up of traditional public e-services steadily harder in the following years. Citizens want to transit from being mere consumers of public services to creators of those services, i.e. prosumers of the open government ecosystem. Furthermore, nowadays more and more citizens want to give their say in the governance of the territory, expressing needs and ideas that can contribute to the growing of the city, so addressing societal challenges. In this context, it is required to migrate from the current e-government approach, adopted by most public administrations, to a collaborative governance, where all the stakeholders, namely citizens, companies and academia are treated as peers (collaborators), and the public administration acts as an enabler. This paper proposes the Open Innovation Area and the Visual Composer as tools enabling the Service Co-Creation model and innovation approach (see Figure 1) defined within the WeLive EU project1.

Open Innovation Area

The Open Innovation Area (OIA), is an evolved Idea Management System that provides a social co-creation environment where needs, ideas and possible "solutions" can be matched and asked to the Public Authority for implementation, for seeking business collaborations, for replicating existing apps published in the Marketplace. This is the place where requests meet possible offers. Thanks to the Open Innovation Area, the needs are made public and the local stakeholders (PA representatives, citizens, businesses, academic representatives) can be involved into the fruitful activities that aim to define and implement the best solutions.

The Open Innovation Area allows managing of the following main concepts:

•   Need reports: It is a report of needs of public interest pointed out to an Authority. A needs report can be defined by citizens, companies and academia representatives. •   Challenges: A challenge represents a "call for ideas/potential solutions" related to needs/proposals of public interest. •   Ideas: An idea describes a potential solution to a challenge. An idea can be proposed by citizens, companies and academia. Best ideas will be promoted for implementation. Hence, the Open Innovation Area provides functionalities to: •   Suggest or report common needs to Public Authorities, Municipalities, Industry, Academia, whose can trigger the definition of challenges (or call for ideas) linked

to specific topics (e.g. energy efficiency, IoT, health, quality of life, social services); •   Co-define, through social and collaboration features, new ideas that address the challenges.

1 WeLive consortium, H2020 INSO-1-2014 “WeLive” EU project, http://www.welive.eu

Opportunity*identification

Data*collection

Pattern*recognition

Concept*ideasConceptualization

Prototype

Test

Deployment*&*Use

Co; experience

Co; definitionCo; development

Co; delivery

WHATHOW

Inspire and*involve

Idea*generation

Evaluation*and*selectionRefinement

Implementation

Monitoring

Figure 1 - Service co-creation and innovation approach defined in WeLive project

Figure 2 – Details of an idea in elaboration phase

•   Evaluate and select, in a democratic way, the better idea through voting and commenting mechanisms; •   Monitor the status of ideas according to an idea lifecycle that will be defined during the project; •   Establish new business collaborations.

The Open Innovation Area is meant to cover the gap between citizens and public administrations by offering a co-definition environment where all the stakeholders form a workgroup and they can contribute to the process of ideation and implementation of a public service.

The Open innovation area supports the following phases of the service co-creation and innovation approach: Inspire and involve, Idea Generation, Evaluation and selection, Refinement and Monitoring. The Implementation phase is supported by the Visual Composer.

Visual Composer

The Visual Composer is a web tool that supports the workgroup to implement new applications and services by adopting an approach oriented to the reuse of the existing resources. Thanks to its user friendly editor, the Visual Composer offers straightforward and intuitive wizard based components that enable non-technical users to create new public services by mash-upping data of resources publicly available and published onto the Marketplace catalogue. Through the Visual Composer, the development process will not be monopolized by highly specialized companies. Moreover, the reuse and composition oriented approach allows to reduce the time-to-market (ideation and realization) of the solution and so to enhance its value. In particular, the Visual Composer allows to easily draw application GUIs (Graphical User Interface) related to the mashup services by using a set of built-in Web elements (HTML tags, players and maps) and combining them in order to create web pages (Figure 3).

Figure 3 – Visual Composer GUI and produced application

According to the innovation process shown in Figure 1, the Visual Composer interacts with the OIA to supports the workgroups activities during the Idea Implementation phase.

Starting from the description and requirements of the idea to be implemented, provided by the OIA, the Visual Composer supports the workgroup to model the mashup and the application GUI. Moreover, the workgroup can share into the Open Innovation Area the mockups of the current status of his work into the Visual Composer, in order to involve other users to the co-definition activities by expressing their appreciation and leaving comments (Figure 4). These feedbacks can be very helpful 1) to the modeler in order to design a suitable solution to user needs, and 2) to users that so can contribute to the realization of a solution.

The outcome of the idea “Implementation” phase is one or more artefacts implemented in compliance with the requirements and published into the Marketplace. When the implementation of the idea is completed, the idea can be promoted to the “Monitoring” phase. During this phase all stakeholders can continue to provide feedbacks by voting and commenting the artefacts linked with the idea, in order to get the Authority able to verify the respect of the requirements during the solution long-term runtime.

Figure 4 - Visual Composer current result shared on OIA