This paper provides feedback from the experimentation of an innovation contest as a mean to support collaborative activities at the early phases of service design. Our objective is to derive from our investigation an innovation contest organization support service that allows launching and monitoring such events in multiple settings. The aim of providing such a service corresponds to the need of facilitating collaborative and open innovation strategies and to provide new solutions for assisting individual and collective upskilling in collaborative service design practices. Innovation contests are currently used as instruments to trigger new ideas and foster creativity, be they individual or collective, based on personal or organizational participation, whatever their level of specificity or object. Besides their fashionable and fun qualities, there is general consensus on a lack of structured guidelines and fact-based elements and indicators to monitor and use their residual value. The experimentation protocol consisted in the ethnographical observation of a full-scale innovation contest. This contest, tailored for a RTO (Research & Technological Organization) in the field of service science, management and engineering, was specifically instrumented to support the co-creation phases of a service system, from ideation to the assessment of the service value. In this paper, we will address how we have investigated collaborative service design, iterating from theoretical to empirical situations in order to produce actionable knowledge. Elaborating efficient creativity support systems starts by capturing the appropriated requirements, involving key stakeholders in defining and building implementation strategies of such systems.
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