Who are our stakeholders?
Do a stakeholder analysis
What is the result?
The result of this step will be an overview over the direct and indirect stakeholders related to the technology design, whose life and/or work will be impacted by the technology.
Why?
Because VSD aims to attune the technology to the values of these stakeholders in order to make it valuable to them and increase uptake. To do this you need to know who the stakeholders are.
A stakeholder in the innovation process is either a group or an individual who is potentially affected by the innovation and/or has a (vested) interest.
A distinction can be made between direct and indirect stakeholders. Direct stakeholders directly interact with the technology. Indirect stakeholders do not or rarely interact with the technology itself, but they are nevertheless affected by it. Often, indirect stakeholders are ignored in the design process, but it is better to include them. For example, many computerized medical records have been designed with direct stakeholders in mind, such as insurance companies, hospitals, doctors, and nurses. But values of important indirect stakeholders have been largely ignored: the patients. Taking into account the values and interests of patients would have contributed to making a more acceptable product.
How?
There are several methods to identify stakeholders such as, brainstorming, reviewing the literature or conducting interviews. These stakeholders can be noted in a map. (See below, Figure 1). The company that designs and develops the technology is at the center of the map. Direct stakeholders are in the vertical axes, while the indirect ones are in the corners. Box 1 presents an example of a stakeholders inventory of a fruit case of the Horizon 2020 project Internet of Food & Farm (IOF2020).
Figure 1. Stakeholder map of a large organization (Freeman, R.E., 2010, Strategic Management. A Stakeholder Approach. Cambridge University Press).
Box 1: Example
Stakeholder identification
Box 1
Example of a stakeholder identification
In one of the fruit cases of the EU funded Horizon2020 project ‘Internet of Food & Farm 2020’, a technological tool was developed aiming at improving the quality of wine during transport. The tool combines GPS location data and temperature sensor data for temperature monitoring during transportation. The tech provider developing this tool identified the following direct stakeholders: the winemaker/seller and the transport company using the tool. He identified as indirect stakeholders: the wine trader, the insurance company, consumers, and the retailer. Also, a hacker was included as indirect stakeholder to include in the reflection possible harms that hackers could inflict to other stakeholders.