Mastering citizen involvement in international open innovation challenges

EU-funded project FRANCIS focuses on involving citizens in the development of so-called Frugal Innovations, i.e. simple, affordable and sustainable solutions. It does so by organising open-innovations challenges that are managed through an IT-platform and supported by various recruitment and ideation formats. Usually, Citizen Science only involves citizens for minor tasks such as data collection. FRANCIS jump ahead in science is that the project invites them to propose and work on new solutions that have a real chance to enter the market. Before starting the challenges, the team of FRANCIS already made some assumptions about how to encourage and support participants in the best possible way based on existing publications and first findings from primary research. Now that the first challenge is running, the team had the opportunity to check whether they have proven to be true so far. This paper presents the interim lessons learned and details the way forward.