On Thursday, 16 January 2020, the Slovenian PEOPLE project team delivered a workshop on people-centred development approaches for employees of Slovenian companies, sharing the knowledge, experiences, and best practices from the project outcomes and from the wider PEOPLE community. The workshop was organised as part of the Competent Slovenia project, run by the Competence Centers for Human Resources Development of the Public Scholarship, Development, Disability and Maintenance Fund of the Republic of Slovenia. Competent Slovenia is a set of workshops and trainings designed for employees and above all, for employers and top management, aiming to provide and improve the wide range of competences for reducing the existing discrepancies between current knowledge and emerging needs at the global labour market.

In the workshop, titled Forget about Users – Start Thinking about People, Dr Dan Podjed, Gregor Cerinšek, and Dr Sara Arko presented the key principles of people-centred development and gave practical examples – from PEOPLE, as well as from several Horizon 2020 projects (e.g. MOBISTYLE, TripleA-reno), in which the approach has been implemented as part of the research & innovation process. The workshop participants were familiarised with the relevance and principles of interdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder research and development approaches, co-creation, acknowledging the differences in experience, practice, views, values, or needs and understanding them as an advantage to develop meaningful solutions, products, or services. In the practical part of the workshop, the participants worked in smaller teams, focusing on the process of cooperation and co-creation between different stakeholders based on people-centred development principles. The workshop concluded with a presentation of how people-centred approaches can be integrated into the evaluation process and strategy, in order to monitor and assess the relevance and impact of our projects.

The workshop contributed to further strengthening of the university-business cooperation, supporting exchange between research, education, business and industry, as well as dissemination of PEOPLE project results and building of the wider PEOPLE community.