Designing Children's Maker Workshops as Multi-Stakeholder Services: A Service-Marketing Perspective

Children's makerspace programmes often start as funded pilot projects and then face the challenge of becoming sustainable services. Against this background, this study examines children's maker workshops from a service-marketing perspective and conceptualizes them as multi-stakeholder services embedded in a maker ecosystem. Building on service-dominant logic, the study empirically analyzes the expectations of key stakeholder groups—enablers, financiers, and facilitators—across two distinct workshop formats within an Austrian maker initiative. A mixed-methods design was applied. In an ex-ante survey, trainers, parents, teachers/school leaders, and company representatives rated and ranked literature-derived expectation items of maker workshops to reveal relative priorities. Results were subsequently validated and extended in several co-creation workshops. Findings show that stakeholders see many workshop design goals as important, especially hands-on skills, safe tool use, self-confidence, teamwork, and enjoyment, while digital activities, the presentation of workshop outcomes, creativity elements, and a sense of group belonging are more contested. However, the prioritization of workshop design elements is not convergent among stakeholders and require hence, an adaptation to the context of the different stakeholder groups. Qualitative results highlight additional ecosystem-level expectations (e.g., alignment with schools, structured school–company collaboration, inclusion, and organisational reliability), suggesting that long-term value requires an orchestration of the maker ecosystem beyond individual workshops. The paper provides actionable design principles and a transferable expectation-based instrument for practitioners, makers, and researchers.