Enhancing Urban Environmental Sustainability Through Unified Stakeholders Needs Co-Creation Process (AENEA)

This paper introduces the Unified Stakeholders Needs Co-creation Process (AENEA), a novel approach that unifies the Agile methodology for software development with co-creation methodologies. AENEA is specifically suited for direct stakeholder engagement in research and innovation development projects that demand empowered stakeholder interactions for the development of information technology innovations to deliver their anticipated added value. Unlike traditional user engagement methods, AENEA focuses on fluid, iterative collaboration and continuous feedback collection, directly using stakeholder's recommendations in the Agile software development process. Through five (5) iterative steps, AENEA clarifies, refines and synchronises stakeholder needs, fostering an open, and adaptable, collaboration framework for shared value generation. AENEA is being implemented in the EU-funded OneAquaHealth project which showcases the importance of urban aquatic ecosystems for the human mental and physical health while also providing a novel AI-based environmental surveillance system to monitor and protect these places.