ToyLabs D2.1 - ToyLabs Open Innovation and Co-Creation Integrated Methodology -v1

The main purpose of this deliverable is to hand over a unified methodology, to be used by the toy industry, and specifically SMEs, for attaching more value to their design processes and new product development activities. This will be achieved through the collaboration of different stakeholders, building on the notion of co-creation and open innovation that aims at accelerating their innovation cycles resulting to more inspirational, novel and desirable creations, while also partner matching functionalities will make possible to find time-wisely and effortlessly the right partner for the task in question, augmented reality will ensure the acquisition of informed and accurate end-users’ feedback and finally market trend analysis will integrate crowd wisdom into new product development activities for the toy industry. In this context, a landscape analysis was implemented in section 2 of this deliverable on the research fields of “Co-creation and Open Innovation”, “Market Trend Analysis”, “Augmented Reality for feedback gathering” and finally “Partner Matching”, both from the perspective of the manufacturing industry in general but also zooming in the toy industry, in particular, to identify its state-of-the-art with respect to the general research community. This analysis evinced the variety and volume of ongoing research studies on these fields, but also the challenge to be met inside ToyLabs in order to turn these results towards the needs of the toy industry, thus providing a unique offering. The valuable insights gained from this literature review were used as input for the construction of a well-defined and extendable methodological approach for renovating the design and manufacturing processes of the toy industry. Firstly, the discrete methodological steps of the holistic ToyLabs methodology under the spirit of Open Innovation were defined, while afterwards the discrete methodological foundations for market trend analysis, augmented reality for feedback gathering and partner matching were introduced. Thus, a concrete workflow was created to guide the next steps of the project and specifically the design and development of the ToyLabs platform and its added-value components. The work done on this deliverable will be updated during the next months of the project, both with respect to the literature review and the project’s methodology, and its results will be documented on a next deliverable, D2.2, in M13