Participatory design as a tool to foster innovation: A case study of an aviation company

Abstract

Participatory design and co‐creation have recently been considered as an effective approach in fostering innovation. Traditionally, tools such as brainstorming, focus groups and discussion boards were dominant in guiding discussions around innovation and solutions. While each of these tools consider great advantages in fostering innovations, there are sometimes drawbacks in conducting them in an unbiased way. This paper aims to provide the results and learnings from a participatory session called Group Elicitation Method (GEM) to co‐create future of business jets in Embraer company. In general, this experiment finds GEM as a very effective tool for consensus seeking, in the contexts where participants have diverse backgrounds and power balance is not symmetrical. The project was conducted as part of the author's PhD research on passenger experience.