Last month, together with the Lisbon Council, we launched our newest Policy Brief ‘Co-Creation at Scale: How Service Design, Living Labs and Innovation Networks Help Public Servants Deliver Better Services – and How Those Services Can Be Made Sustainable’
In specific, Charlotte van Ooijen, senior research fellow, and Francesco Mureddu, director at the Lisbon Council, analysed 56 case studies produced by the Co-VAL consortium in 11 countries and proposed the following four-point programme for making co-creation long-term and sustainable:
- Strengthen Legitimacy
The lack of continued support by public authorities, including adequate funds and availability of human resources, is related to the sometimes low visibility and status of co-creation projects.
- Ensure Organisational Support.
In conjunction with putting in place the appropriate formal requirements in a given country context, it is essential to ensure that the co-creation initiatives in which different public organisations want to be involved, are well-coordinated and also have the necessary abilities and capacity to enact them.
- Incite Cultural Change.
Besides putting in place the aforementioned formal measures for co-creation, attention needs to go to having the right informal conditions both to support implementation and to remove barriers. It is very important to motivate public servants to always take on board users’ needs and make it easy for them to do so.
- Make Stakeholder Participation Easy.
Even when public organisations are completely geared towards co-creation and ready to initiate and participate in the design of user-driven services, it will not work if key external stakeholders are not on board. In other words, getting citizens, businesses, and civil society organisations to express their needs and provide input on potential solutions or actually to co-construct those solutions, is a crucial aspect of removing barriers to more sustainable co-creation at scale.
You can download our latest policy brief here.
To view and download previous policy briefs please visit this link.