Co-Creation

What is Co-Creation?

Co-Creation is a great way to bring together different parties like organisations, experts, customers, target groups or other institutions and let them follow one collaborative problem solving process. Enabling a group of people - usually from different backgrounds - to create together allows you to apply a holistic approach to a project, promote new insights and leverage various perspectives on the challenge you want to tackle. The co-creation sessions are organized in workshop formats. Within these sessions you are able to co-create projects, services, products, spaces or investigate a specific context. Those who involve a diverse group of participants as a multidisciplinary team in the early identification or ideation phase of a development reduce the risk of blind spots and incorrect assumptions. You will be able to create new ideas, foster new communication and profit from an intense knowledge transfer.

How does it work? - An exemplary project process …

Preparation:

• Identifying the challenge and formulating the right tasks for the co-creation session (by analyzing your goals and insights, former research, current process and results)
• Defining your group of co-creators (e.g. employees, target group, partners, customers, citizens, users) – who do you want to take part?
• Designing and planning the co-creation process and workshop based on creative methodology and tools
• Recruiting participants

Co-Creation-Session:
Depending on the challenge and the corresponding tasks, the workshop can be set up for an afternoon or several days. We will lead your team through the whole workshop by setting it up and facilitating it. The activities will be designed according to the objectives (e.g. Focussed discussion round, Ideation, Shift Plays, Prototyping) Everybody is treated as a designer and owner. Within the workshop you will get various quality insights you were not able to capture before. All learnings and key insights will be documented and synthesized afterwards.

Why is it important?

Groups, especially diverse groups, can often generate more creative ideas than individuals and inspire each other in very effective ways by sharing ideas, building on each others’ work, criticizing and competing which each other. Furthermore you get the chance to empower your target group by letting them become your co-creators and partners.

A Co-Creation process can be a great chance to gather unknown viewpoints and experiences to help your organization expand the angle of attention to problems and solutions. This creates new ideas, new communication and knowledge transfer and leads your team members to overcome their own operational perspectives. It can boost cooperation, speed up development processes and get the right people behind the challenge. Sometimes it is helpful to find extreme participants like rejectors, intense users or experts in specific fields.

What is our opinion?

As the level and perspective of knowledge is ideally very diverse, the Co-creation process has to be structured well and the tasks should be easy to understand. It might be useful to include co-creaters in an early stage of the process. And it is very important to consider well who will be a good co-creator regarding to your aim. We will consult and support you in all of these considerations.