Towards Contributory Development by the Means of Services as Common Goods

This paper describes our exploratory approach to enable and sustain the environments-oriented creation of services as common goods. We first discuss the characteristics of services, which allow them to be envisaged as engines of innovation and we study the role of economy of contribution in this innovative development. Second, we present an approach supporting the collaborative innovation-oriented work of actors from multiple domains, which facilitates concretizing services. This is achieved by virtue of “Tiers-Lieu”, collaborative environments of service innovation, where services are envisaged as common goods. To illustrate the organization of Tiers-Lieu, we present its conceptual framework, and discuss an example from the domain of mHealth. The paper is concluded with the perspectives of the ongoing work for contributive development within service society.