Attending one of the network meetings of the swedish network of living labs - ollse - I reflect over the amount of new ways to engage users that has come durint the past months. Some of the large companies, for instance Dell and Starbucks (check out starbucks ideas) have been working with idea generation from their customers during some time now. Their experience from involving the users in the development process is that generating ideas gets fairly simple, evaluation of ideas and commercialization is difficult.
A good example is Ubuntu Brainstorm, which during 6 months generated over 12 000 ideas and has had over 1.2 million comments. Hopingly we can, as a part of Living Labs Öresund, during this autumn start up a simmilar service primarily towards students in our m-student project.
During spring we also have tested other ways to engage users, my first reflection is that traditional workshops are still king when you want to communicate with end users or customers. We have also learned that it is important to have some sort of infrastructure in the workshop, just telling people to start create ideas wasn't a very good idea.
Let's follow the development together. On Living Labs Öresund homepage you will find both all our research, ways to learn about the netgeneration, results from our experiments and possibilities to participate in the flow of ideas we want to create.