A co-creation approach to identifying vehicle-sharing concepts for future markets

Abstract

While ‘the sharing economy’ is widely promoted as one of the most promising solutions to changing lifestyles in the field of mobility, huge uncertainty still exists regarding which future vehicle-sharing concepts should be developed to meet the very wide range of specific, individual needs. To reduce this uncertainty, new approaches are established and evaluated to integrate the perspective of different customer groups into the innovation process directly and continuously. One very promising approach in this context is ‘co-creation’.
This paper presents both the methodology and the results of its application, developed in the co-creation project “ProVIL – product development with future users in a virtual idea laboratory” conducted in 2017 with a group of Mechanical Engineering Master’s students focusing on the development of vehicle-sharing concepts for future users. To ensure relevance and quality of their concepts, the students used a wide range of existing and new innovation procedures, which were evaluated during the project in the sense of empirical Live-Lab studies.