Of course, knowing the desires and needs of your stakeholders is the basis for developing successful products and services. In China, Volkswagen therefore used an open innovation approach: ‘The People’s Car Project’. At NEXT Berlin, Georg Warga (Goodstein & Partners) and Sven John (GREENKERN) explained the idea behind and their biggests learnings.

‘The People’s Car’ is the biggest open innovation project among all car brands in China. It was launched in order to better understand the needs of Chinese people. Everyone understanding Mandarin could participate in the project and create the car of his dreams. Some of them are very futuristic, others suited for solving existing problem, e.g. traffic jams.

The whole project lasted 18 months – a challenge for the involved communication professionals. They needed to create long lasting engagement and participation in order to sustain the hype over the whole period. In their keynote talk Warga and John presented Volkswagen’s approach, useful insights and interesting examples from a best practice example in the field of open innovation.