Keyword Mingling workshop - a method for identifying and consolidating industrially perceived needs and requirements of future operators. Presented at the Swedish Production Symposium

Investments into the production technology of the future require a firm basis in the needs of production industry. However, gathering, sorting and ranking cross-industrial future needs remains a steep challenge to technology developers. Gathering feedback from just one or a few case companies can result in a biased set of priorities, since feedback from specific industrial sectors may often be highly influenced by their industry- and product-specific challenges. This paper describes a structured method called “Keyword Mingling” that addresses the collection of such feedback in a multi-partner workshop format. The workshop method presented in this paper resolves this by using a highly interactive "mingling " technique to get participants in a large group workshop (between 15- 20 people) to answer a specific question. The participants discuss ideas in smaller groups, share their findings to the group at large, co-operatively organize the input from all participants into functional categories, and finally perform a 'ranking ' of the results. The outcome is a prioritized list of concerns to focus research efforts on, providing workshop analysts with a finished structure for reporting the results. The method was tested in two workshops within the project "The Operator of the Future " and resulted in plenty of positive feedback from participants, who felt that the input was relevant, well-structured, and easy to agree with due to the consensus categorizing