Keyword Mingling workshop - a method for identifying and consolidating industrially perceived needs and requirements of future operators

Paper in proceeding, 2012

Investments into the production technology of the future require a firm basis in the needs of production industry. However, gathering, sorting and ranking cross-industrial future needs remains a steep challenge to technology developers. Gathering feedback from just one or a few case companies can result in a biased set of priorities, since feedback from specific industrial sectors may often be highly influenced by their industry- and productspecific challenges. This paper describes a structured method called “Keyword Mingling” that addresses the collection of such feedback in a multi-partner workshop format. The workshop method presented in this paper resolves this by using a highly interactive "mingling" technique to get participants in a large group workshop (between 15 - 20 people) to answer a specific question. The participants discuss ideas in smaller groups, share their findings to the group at large, co-operatively organize the input from all participants into functional categories, and finally perform a 'ranking' of the results. The outcome is a prioritized list of concerns to focus research efforts on, providing workshop analysts with a finished structure for reporting the results. The method was tested in two workshops within the project "The Operator of the Future" and resulted in plenty of positive feedback from participants, who felt that the input was relevant, well-structured, and easy to agree with due to the consensus categorizing.