Public Services as a Living Lab – Ponto JA Store

OBJECTIVE

This project is a result of a partnership between LabX – Innovation Centre for the Public Sector – AMA and the Portuguese Institute of Sports and Youth, I.P. (IPDJ) with the purpose of testing different prototypes in an open innovation environment where young people, technicians and experts cohabit collaboratively in a horizontal relationship to test solutions for existing challenges in public services dedicated to young people.

BENEFICIARIES

Young population (aged 15-29)

APPROACH

A 4-week experimentation programme was set up, piloted by LabX, with the direct involvement of several IPDJ teams, both from Coimbra’s Ponto JA Store and from its Central structure, where they played an active role both in the planning of the experimentation programme and in the evaluation process of the prototypes with the young people.

The programme also included a period of time dedicated to training and skills transfer to IPDJ’s employees, giving them an active role in testing the solutions of the Living Lab:

• training of design and structure of the 1st version of the questionnaire for assessing the initiatives associated with the new concept of the Ponto JA store and application of the questionnaire to young people.
• training of strategies and tools to support the analysis and systematisation of the data resulting from the application of the questionnaires.

The Living Lab also included the participation of two partners from the national innovation ecosystem:

• Design Factory Aveiro (DFA) for the development of a high fidelity prototype of a self-service reception desk;
• Fraunhofer AICOS Portugal (FhP) to support LabX in the design of evaluation tools for the prototypes and their application with young people.

MAIN RESULTS

The solutions tested in this controlled and safe environment resulted from 3 different projects in which LabX was involved:

• Landing page ON@18 – The public services guide for young people – and the Chatbot of the ePortugal portal;

• The self-service reception desk that resulted from the “Self-Service Accelerator” project;

• New concept of Ponto JA Store, which resulted from the project “Re)design of services of the Ponto JA Network“.

---