Alcatel-Lucent is part of a group of companies that presented the findings of a Europe-wide research project that evaluated ways in which average citizens could become engaged in the creation and development of innovative online applications. Addressing the boom in new user-generated digital content and the new digital formats with which they are shared, the partners investigated in particular the role that the Internet and television play in creating social networks and how these media can influence people's daily lives and foster social change.
The Citizen Media study spanned almost three years and tracked how thousands of non-professionals (those with no prior ICT experience or Internet usage) invented and developed socially-beneficial applications.
In the end, participants from Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Norway created a diverse series of applications that were deemed to deliver some social benefit.
The sociologists and engineers who made up the Citizen Media research team were led by Michiel Pelt of Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs in Antwerp who noted, "This is technology upside down. The advantage of working with living labs is that by observing and working with end-users who are designing, developing and deploying their ideas we can quickly turn these inventions into socially relevant innovations that have value to them. Innovations that are built with customers have a higher probability of sustainable market adoption so this type of Open Innovation really pays off."
