The point of departure for this article is empirical findings from a collaborative research project on Smart Mobility and Sharing Economy and (SMaSE). One of the goals of the project was to design a digital service supporting smart mobility grounded on sharing economy principles. The digital service was also tested in a real-life setting during a period of three weeks. After the project, two of the actors commercialized the digital service. The digital service designed and tested in SMaSE is an example of digital service innovation (DSI).

In the literature DSI is described as a combinatorial evolution process in which preexisting technologies and institutions are (re)combined through actors’ collective and co-creative effort to create customer value. Multiple researchers have claimed that learning and knowledge sharing between heterogenous actors in DSI has not been thoroughly explored. An innovation process can be sequential, iterative, agile, cyclical, incremental, evolutionary, or even combinatorial. In other words, the process could be conducted in many ways. But there is common characteristic, early in the innovation process, there are ideation-, design and prototyping modules. The outcome of these modules are normally ideas, design sketches or prototypes, described (sometimes with programming code) visually and/or textually. In those modules activities are carried out, one example is workshops grounded in “thinking together”.

In this article we propose that workshops supporting knowledgeability should be integrated in the early phase of digital service innovation. In this article workshops supporting knowledgeability is referred to as “learnsperience” (In the german language “Lernerfahrung”). In socio-cultural learning theories one description of knowledgeability is the ability to handle the relationships among a multitude of practices in the landscape that makes them recognizable as legitimate actors in a social system, in our case, the collaborative research project SMaSE. The research question is: Which are the elements and activities in workshops supporting knowledgeability in digital service innovation? The aim of the paper is to gain an understanding of workshops supporting knowledgeability in digital service innovation.

The research approach in SMaSE was engaged scholarship. Engaged scholarship is regarded as a pluralistic approach, the researchers can determine how to engage with practice in different research activities based on the research purpose, attached, or detached from practice. During SMaSE some research activities are collaborative and co-creative, such as workshops, which is regarded as attached activities. Other activities such as research planning, reading articles, writing articles or doing analytical work is regarded as detached activities. The collected data comes from attached activities in SMaSE, a research project that lasted 2,5 years. The contribution of the paper is a framework for planning, conducting, and evaluating workshops supporting knowledgeability in digital service innovation.

Keywords: Knowledgeability, digital service innovation, heterogenous actors, Engaged scholarship.