Connecting customers and designers at Owela: Online platform for service co-design

The Web 2.0 and social media phenomenon have enabled customers' roles to change from passive objects to active participants. Companies are opening their innovation processes with the aim of enabling and attracting customers more, involving them in the value creation processes as co-creators. We created Owela, an open web laboratory, to build an online community for participatory design and open innovation. Currently, Owela serves as a platform that collects user feedback, experiences and ideas from different physical and online sources and offers a place for co-design. A long time goal is to provide users with tools for creating their own products and services together with other users. In this paper, our aim is to provide insights on utilising online research tools and conducting participatory design process at Owela. We present a project-based co-design model for creating new services with customers and end users at Owela. In addition, we report our experiences from a finished and an on-going case study in the project Täky and P2P-Next projects. Our conclusion is that tools and methods used for the offline world cannot be directly moved on to the web, thus the whole design process should be reconsidered so that it works well and logically online.