Elderly care services have in recent years been undergoing
a significant restructuring due to shrinking resources of public sector and a growing
number of older adults.  The change has
been visible in the structural level: focus has been on re-allocation of resources
to the home care services.  Beside the
structural changes and due to constantly shrinking resources there are need to
find new solutions and new ways of working also in the organizational level.

Driving force for renewing services in the public
sector has been the demand for effectiveness and productivity (Anttonen, 2009).
This has been strengthened by the ideology of New Public Management (NPM) which
guided public sector organizations to follow the dogma of business management.
Organizational renewal in the public sector has often been initiated by
policy-makers and management and it has rested on structural reorganizing and
policy implementation. Role of the employees has mainly been to adopt the
changes. (Windrum, 2008; Saari et al 2015.)

This ideology has in recent years been supplemented
and partly replaced by the doctrine emerging from the paradigm of New Public
Governance, where public sector organizations are seen as complex service
systems operating in the wide networks (Osborne2010).  Virtanen and Stenvall (2014) describe the
public organizations as arenas for interaction, co-operation and co-creation
where the role of service-users and service-personnel as actors in the service
development processes should be recognized. Innovations emerging from the open
co-creation process in this network play an important role when renewing
services (Chesbrough 2010).

The deployment of competencies and innovation capacity
of the staff, participation in development actions and empowerment of service
users can also be seen as an emerging orientation in the development of social
and health care services. For example the use of service design methods has
helped to formulate low threshold services for the elderly (Miettinen 2011) and
the development of systematic workshop method recognizes and develops further the
ideas of the personnel in the social and health care sector (Tienhaara 2015). This
shift to understand the possibilities and potential of the personnel or
customers as actors in renewal of services has brought new elements to the
service development in the public sector.

This paper examines a process where an assisted living
unit for elderly people is planned under the scarcity of resources. The
emphasis is on how the employees- to-be are engaged in the planning process of
the new unit, how they experience and act in the collaborative development
process and how a web-based tool can support the process.