Co-creating a new remote service for and with elderly people in the Netherlands

Lessons learnt

The main learning points from this project are that the iterative development of new service concepts and prototypes takes time, as also does the learning process for the client team, given that it wants to really grasp the essence involved in every stage. For learning to be deep and sustainable, the communication and documentation of the process needs careful attention.

Another obvious learning point is that involving elderly people in service co-creation only succeeds if the workshops take account of special needs of the target group. Finding an easily accessible venue is important, given that it is quite a big thing for many of them to take the trouble of leaving their homes. Moreover, the sessions cannot last too long. And the number of people in the session should not be too high. Personal stories and individual motivations were the most valuable in the co-creation process. Interestingly, this meant that the most useful contributions tended to come from those elderly people we would label as ‘the general public’, invited through personal contacts, rather than the elderly people who came representing associations, because the latter often had a hard time in speaking from their own experience.