Co-create Social Innovation - A mapping of Co-creation methods for Social Innovation

Abstract: Background and issue of study: The global financial crisis, climate change, demographic changes, and rising inequality are some of the global trends that put pressure on public leaders and organizations, civil society organizations and corporations to shift to a social and environmental sustainable development. Social innovations are demanded to be both drivers of positive societal change and forces against negative developments. Often cross-sectoral, open and collaborative, create new relationships and are built on pro-sumption, grassroots involvement, bottom-up processes, co-production and mutualism. Aspects that can be enhanced with the support of well-designed and wellhosted co-creation activities and processes. Even if there is a common understanding that co-creation plays an important role in the creation of social innovation there is a lack of clarity on what co-creation is and how to actually co-create social innovation. This report aims to give taxonomy for co-creation of social innovation and a general co-creation process that structures the different co-creation methods in a useful way. It is meant to brief people that are new to the area and give a practical framework for social innovation practitioners. Purpose statement: The main purpose with this report is to understand the cocreation methods that are used for enabling Social Innovation. Three sub-purposes: • Sub-purpose one is to identify and describe which cocreation concepts and methods are used among social innovation actors in the same context as Lund University Social Innovation Center (LUSIC). • Sub-purpose two is to design and present a framework that makes it easier to find the "best" cocreation method for the perceived situation during the co-creation process. • Sub-purpose three is to explain how the framework can be used to easy find the "best" co-creation method for the perceived situation during the cocreation process, or plan and implement an entire cocreation process. 4 Methodology: Basic theory about co-creation has been compiled from relevant academic articles and complemented with theory from references found during the field research. A field study methodology inspired by the first phase in the Design Thinking process, Inspiration, has been used in order to find co-creation concepts, and offer a better understanding of the concepts and the co-creation methods they included. During this process 23 relevant actors and events in South Sweden, Denmark, South Finland, and the Basque Country were visited. From presentations, observations, discussions, and participation relevant information and insights where gathered through notes and pictures. The information from the field studies has then been complemented with more literature studies about co-creation concepts and methods that were identified during the field studies. In order to find a process that could structure the co-creation methods a methodology inspired by the second step in the Design Thinking process, Ideation, was used. First an early prototype, a sketch, was created and then developed into the final co-creation process and table for social innovation. Finally found co-creation methods were sorted into the table. Conclusions: The found co-creation concepts in the social innovation are: Art of Hosting, Design Thinking, Service Design, Graphic Facilitation, Visual Thinking, the Business Model Canvas and Transversal Dialogue. The designed structure for how to find the appropriate method for common situations during a co-creation process is a co-creation method table divided after a designed co-creation process built up by three main phases: A. Discover, B. Ideation and C. Implementation. The phases are divided into subphases and some of the sub-phases are divided into steps. The different co-creation methods are sorted into the table according to the sub-phases and the steps. The recommended way to use the co-creation method table is to co-create the social innovation process with stickynotes in a Graphic roadmap with activities (sub-phases and steps) and methods from the co-creation method table.