Co-production of Physical Products and Value Co-creation - Scalability in the Wild

Our wish through this Research in the Wild call is to take a significant step towards collective user creativity in physical products, concurrently generating added value and superior user experience. User communities can collaboratively produce (co-produce) and actively support, vote and enjoy products, and experience co-created product value, though this predominantly resides in a digital media and virtual environment. Many users have yet to interact with manufacturers to co-produce tangible physical products largely because of design and production complexity issues, although this is an area of rapidly growing interest and one which are seek to address in this project. This project aims to break down these barriers, and implement and evaluate user based design, production and web service tools for users and manufacturers to co-produce physical products and co-create user added value and bring these tools to a viable commercial exploitation position. The project will utilise a flexible chocolate Additive Layer Manufacturing (ChocALM) technique and integrate it with mass production technology, thereby engaging a large numbers of users to support co-design and co-production of chocolate gift products. This would help to invigorate a substantial UK share in this global market. This project therefore will boost our experience of a sustainable digital economy, grow the service capability of manufacturers, and bring creativity and innovation to a user society.

This research has significant scope to bring benefit to a mass audience of potential users increasingly aware of and educated in the idea of creating physical products and to many UK and global service providers and manufacturers increasingly wish to have an effective approach to the delivery of user centric products. This is particularly important for UK manufacturers and service producers such as Cadbury as they have to increasingly rely on more personalised products and services in order to create new markets and differentiate from low cost mass production in the Far East. Whilst the emphasis of this proposal is to have a transformative effect in the chocolate gift sector, our aspirations are to demonstrate the benefits of co-creativity and co-production as an exciting personalised experience bringing creativity and innovation to many other industry sectors such as jewellery, toy and homeware. We therefore expect many UK manufacturers and service providers will be able to enhance their service capability and work with many users to generate added value for both personalised and popular physical products thereby reducing the investment and market risk for new product development. The engagement of the chocolate user group and public user group to implement and test this new research idea will ensure that the outcome of the research can be easily adopted by many users to their considerable benefit. Project information will be disseminated through the ChocALM website http://chocalm.org/joomla/ whilst the design tool and service system prototype will be immediately available on the web for users to trial and test. Similar to the ChocALM project, the university will generate media and press articles in regional and national news papers and technology websites and magazines. Our ambition is to develop our research to a stage where we can demonstrate a sufficiently robust user-based design tool, and web-service system that we would eventually patent and / or license. Our interactions with collaborative partners engaged in this project provide us with the feedback needed to ensure that any development will be robust. The partners will attend project meetings and offer advice to the project. On top of the support the project obtains from its external relationships, the University will put in place a process to evaluate the future commercial potential of our design toolkit and web service system, for chocolate products as well as their adoption for other consumer products. This process will be carried out in conjunction with our Research & Knowledge Transfer (RKT) Office which supports the University's IP and commercialisation activities. With a clear vision to promote ChocALM and new digital technology, the PI and Co-Is have secured key industrial support from the project partners and have supervised the early development of the ChocALM prototype since 2007. In addition, all academic investigators have extensive knowledge transfer and public communication experience to work with industrial partners and public users. By closely engaging with Delcam and Cadbury in this project, two excellent UK-based global companies will have a tremendous opportunity to engage in a clear exploitation opportunity for these developing technologies, and to disseminate project outcomes amongst their users and customers.