Involving Citizens in Open Innovation Process by Means of Gamification : the Case of WeLive

Abstract

Citizens' participation in an open innovation process enables them to express their needs and wishes for new kinds of public services. However, the challenge for citizens' participation in the open innovation process is finding methods and ways of working that familiarize the participants with new complex concepts. Also, the challenge is to make the participants' tacit knowledge visible. Design games aim at creating a forum for the meeting of users and designers as well as providing tools for making the empirical tacit knowledge visible. This paper introduces the WeLive design game that aims to help participants in co-design workshops to innovate and develop more concrete and detailed digital service concepts that utilize open data. The WeLive design game was evaluated and used in eight workshops and in total 147 persons took part. The results highlight that design game is an excellent method to involve citizens to the open innovation process and ease their abilities to understand new concepts like open data and form coherent public digital service concepts.