The mission of ACCRA is to enable the development of advanced ICT Robotics based solutions for
extending active and healthy ageing in daily life by defining, developing and demonstrating an agile
co-creation development process
The term agile has been used in the last 15 years in software development to promote adaptive
planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continuous improvement. Agile
development encourages rapid and flexible response to change. As stated by Jim Highsmith2:
The Agile movement is not anti-methodology, in fact many of us want to restore credibility to the
word methodology. We want to restore a balance. We embrace modelling, but not in order to file
some diagram in a dusty corporate repository. We embrace documentation, but not hundreds of
pages of never-maintained and rarely-used tomes. We plan, but recognize the limits of planning in a
turbulent environment.
The term co-creation was popularized in the last 15 years as well3. It refers to the joint creation of
value by the company and the customer; allowing the customer to co-construct the service
experience to suit their context, integrating the principles of dialogue (interaction with users),
access (allow customer to access data), risk (monitor risk and gaps between customer and firm) and
transparency (information barriers eliminated)
A number of challenges have to be addressed:
- Agile programming and co-creation imply important changes at development and at
organisational level
- Ageing applications necessitate a co-creation approach that is fully multidisciplinary, to ensure
Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues (ELSI). This is not only a co-creation between business and
customers, but co-creation between social science, legal, policy makers, engineers, users and
carers.
- Robotics solutions are based on complex ICT environments integrating sensor networks,
handling of big data in the cloud. The concept of flexible platform must be taken into account
to fully participate to the agile co-creation process. In other words, agile co-creation must also
somehow extend to the platform level, not only to the application level. Issues such as
interoperability must be taken into account.
