Is there any way to preserve user selected inputs from previous runs of the notebook?

[jason-ogaard]

It's a common use case for teams in our org to create a notebook, often with dozens of widgets that have preselected values, and then export that notebook to give to someone else. That someone else imports the notebook and modifies one or two of the widget values and then reruns the notebook.

We currently use zeppelin for our notebook needs but want to switch to jupyterlab and ipywidgets seems to be the go to widget library (and it is very good!). However, whenever the user runs the imported notebook the widgets end up going back to their default values. The behavior is perfectly described in this comment

Is there any way to prevent the widgets from resetting?