18. User-Driven Innovation and Knowledge Integration in Elderly Care Services: A Community Integration Model

This chapter shows key methodological factors in applying a user-driven co-creation approach to the domain of service innovations in elderly care, based on three field studies and action research. Through interpretation of the logical structure and service process mechanisms of elderly care, we focus on the relation between the values of elderly people and the knowledge and skills of experts to fulfil these values. The complexity of dimensions of values and categories of support functions is regulated by a moral game between the service user and experts during the process of service creation. Interpreting the user’s status and values during service design by bringing together experts from different disciplines results in services that are easy for users to adopt and facilitates user accommodation of the process of service implementation. Recognising the values to be fulfilled, determining tasks and planning solutions, and fitting together process and method in service provision are conceptualised as ‘designing’. This is not a matter of modulating parts and engineering processes, but of designing the most comfortable and creative solution that will add value for the user. This chapter proposes an active cluster net centred on user-driven co-creation as a community integration model that reflects innovative societal structuring in coordinated human service allocation.