Designing a reciprocal exchange service for a good and engaged senior life

In the Give&Take project, research organisations, SMEs, end-user organisations, and endusers
co-design a reciprocal exchange for a good and engaged senior life. Through engaging
senior citizens, the service addresses a major market opportunity and also releases an unexploited
societal potential for solving tasks predominately under the public sector realm. Behind
the need and opportunity are strong societal macro trends as well as documented positive
effects of seniors' prolonged professional activity and voluntary work. The technological
solution is a state-of-the-art advancement of enabling ICT interfaces for mobile and tablet
formats, including networking tools supporting social innovation. Give&Take empowers seniors,
by improving occupational lifestyle through a reciprocal exchange-service to maintain societal
engagement as a key to mental, social and physical fitness. The Give&Take service offers
a platform for knowledge and experience transfer by making skills and competencies visible
in local communities. Target users are seniors in their early seniority, currently often in
the transition and void between an active work life and retirement. Intensive end-user participation,
including primary, secondary and tertiary segments is ensured throughout the project's
duration through a mixed methods approach, including ethnographic techniques of observations
and interviews, focus groups, cultural probes, LivingLabs and Open Community
Labs taking place in both Denmark and Austria. The business model foresees revenue derived
from marketing the platform and its services to business partners such as municipalities,
senior associations and companies, who aim to engage and empower senior citizens and
reach their untapped potential inside communities and organisations. Customers are partners
interesting in hosting or sponsoring a service exchange platform through which they can invite
citizens to engage in service exchange activities against a monthly license fee.