Co-creation in the Early Stage of Product-service System Development

Co-creation is a well-established topic in manufacturing research. Since 1999 there has been a wide range of publications about the involvement of customers in the design of end products. What is new, however, is the stakeholder, particularly user, integration at the early stage of development of product-service systems (PSS) for concept co-creation. In this paper, we evaluate the methods for PSS development at the fuzzy front-end, before we derive a co-creation oriented method that relies on prototyping at selected stages of the process. The first stage deals with the generation of a shared understanding of the concept to be developed, and in the second stage we converge towards the generation of the user requirements by employing a set of electronic tools to drive process and logic flow thinking within the group of co-creators. The methodology has been evaluated within three workshops involving 42 participants who were asked to design a decentralized bike-sharing system, where bike owners can generate revenues from their bikes by renting them out when not otherwise needed. In a future phase, the results will be compared to the outcomes of a workshop organized with a bike sharing company that is currently developing this model.