Background and problem Audio-visual cultural heritage content should be preserved for our children and their children. However, currently the devices on which this material is stored suffers from decomposition. In addition to that, the content should be unlocked on a larger scale by exploiting modern technologies such as Internet and mobile applications. Therefore projects are initiated by the Dutch government, by putting in 170 million Euro’s, on how to achieve this goal. One of these projects is the Archieven in Beweging (Archives in Motion or AiM), which has as a goal to unlock audio-visual heritage material to a large as possible part of the population of the Netherlands. However, success of projects like the AiM research is lagging behind, which results in lower new investments by the government, which results in less innovation, etc. A vicious circle might occur with the possible effect of never unlocking digital cultural heritage material. To successfully unlock the content, service innovation has to be conducted. However, in recent literature reasons for failing service innovation has become apparent. This failure in creating successful innovative new services is rooted at the non-management of stakeholders and their respective stakes on a strategic level in these innovation projects. The combination of these two problems is translated in the research question: “How does the involvement and management of stakeholders on a strategic level during a design process result in viable services for stakeholders and customers?” Approach First we conducted a literature study with which we made ourselves familiar with the relevant scientific topics in this research: stakeholder management and design science. From selected literature we distilled a framework, based on criteria, which allowed us to identify, involve and manage stakeholders during a design of an innovative service. We decided to conduct a design cycle and stop when a prototype of the design was realized. The second step initiated the design process where we made the design objective explicit, made the requirements of our design explicit, and did stakeholder identification and involvement. Also in this step we have chosen to implement a two-sided platform consisting of a consumer side and a business side. In addition to this platform we decided to put a third interface to our design in terms of a researcher interface, with which a researcher is able to manipulate the design for testing in the R&D phase of the design. The subsequent, third, step consisted of constructing the design in terms of design documents such as use-cases, class diagrams and sequence-diagrams. When these design documents were in place, we made a choice to build a prototype of the multi-sided platform in PHP/HTML5/Javascript/CSS and make use of a Javascript framework: jQuery. The last step of our approach was the validation of the prototype with involved stakeholders, which we planned to do in a workshop with these stakeholders. We designed an experiment with a pretest, treatment and posttest. However unfortunately, only one participant took part in this workshop, leaving us unable to validate our work. Conclusions Because we were not able to validate our approach to involve and manage stakeholders, we are not able to draw definitive conclusions. Furthermore, we are only partly able to answer our research questions for the Dutch digital cultural heritage content context. In this context, involvement and management of stakeholders does not directly result in viable services for stakeholders. We argue that stakeholders are not interested in solving this problem of unlocking digital heritage content, because they do not want to participate in workshop such as we organized. Though alternative explanations, such as weather conditions and other events, might also have influenced our findings. A second conclusion that we are able to draw is that involvement and management of stakeholders does not result in viable services if the problem for which the service is developed is a non-problem. We indicate the problem in the case we studied as a non-problem for stakeholders because they contradict their claims about the importance of unlocking cultural heritage content by not willing to put effort in the development of new services. We point out that this unwillingness might be the result of a learning curve stakeholders experience, we first interviewed them and presented solutions that they might find not worth to put effort in. Our research shows that stakeholder analysis as presented in literature is not sufficient to create viable services. Therefore we propose a stakeholder-centric design for designing and implementing new services. We recommend future research on stakeholder-centric design in combination with concurrent business model development in design cycles. In this way, we expect that a vicious circle is avoided and that invested community funds are, at least partly, returned.