“Sticks’n'Sushi is able to optimise processes of development using co-creation, but this makes demands on the organisa- tion: we have to bring the right resources into play at the right time, which means involving more employees, cutting across the traditional organisational diagram,” concluded Kim Rahbek, the Director of Sticks’n'Sushi, after the company management had taken part in a Copenhagen Co’creation workshop.

Co-creation has been identified as one of the business strategies of the future, improving effectiveness and knowledge sharing and thus cutting down on the use of resources and consumption in general. During Copenhagen Coʼcreation: Designing for Change 09, more than 250 Danish and foreign companies, designers and experts in innovation concluded that there is a huge potential in using co-creation as a business strategy for innovation. As a pilot project, Copenhagen Coʼcreation invited management teams from Sticks’n'Sushi, ME-FA and KPMG to work for a day on how each company could use co-creation to translate knowledge and skills into new products and solutions and improved work processes. One of the aims of Copenhagen Coʼcreation is to spread the knowledge about co-creation gained during the international meeting in August 2009 to Danish companies.

Sticks’n'Sushi took part in a one-day workshop on 3 December 2009 – and when we asked Kim Rahbek afterwards what his company gained from working with co-creation, he stressed that he sees great potential in it in terms of processes of development within Sticks’n'Sushi.

On 3 December 2009, SticksʼnʼSushi took part in a Copenhagen Coʼcreation Workshop. Kim Rahbek, SticksʼnʼSushi (left) with Mikael Hallstrup and Niels Clausen-Stuck, Designit, who ran the workshop.

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The Danish company, Grundfos, a giant in the field of pumps, has re-thought its approach to developing talent and creating results through co-creation.

A global talent machine
A practical example of how Grundfos uses co-creation is their new talent programme.
”One of the major challenges that we constantly face at Grundfos is how to train and develop a staff of over 18,000 people in more than 50 countries. We have come a long way with training the broad mass of our employees, but on top of that we now also need to be world class at developing the very best of them, those with real talent. We badly need the best people because we have designed a very ambitious strategy with a vision that aims to develop radically innovative products and solutions”, explains Lisbet Thyge Frandsen.

To meet the challenge of designing a concept for developing talent that can be used all over the world, Grundfos has chosen to develop the concept as a co-creation project.

”We had to act quickly and it had to work all over the world. And because it will affect a very large number of people, I felt it important to develop a concept that that they all could relate to. So, to ensure that the concept had local roots and was culturally broad in scope, we gathered a group of 40 managers and specialists from 23 countries who were all passionately interested in the task and prominent in terms of forming public opinion in their local environment. This was a very diverse group and they were given four days to design a new concept for talent development”, adds Lisbet Thyge Frandsen. (more…)

An interview with christian bason by Ida Vesterdal, partner at VIA Design

In August this year, 35 international experts in co-creation and design thinking gathered in Copenhagen to form the international Copenhagen Co’creation Network. The aim of this network is to harvest the experience already gained through the application of co-creation and to disseminate knowledge of co-creation as a tool to tackle the social, cultural and economic challenges we face today.

The public sector in the western world was very much in focus, especially the question of increasing pressures to make social innovation a priority and the related question of: What must be done to equip the public sector to react positively to this pressure and come up with viable solutions?

When asked to identify the greatest challenge facing the public sector today, apart from climate changes, employment and new technologies, Christian Bason selects one central challenge, which concerns the system and its users:

“The public sector is facing staff shortages in the coming years. Every second manager in the public sector and one quarter of all public employees will be retiring in the next 7-8 years.”

“At the same time, the public is demanding more and more of its public services. People expect coordinated and meaningful services that can effectively help them to meet their own personal challenges.” (more…)

To introduce the work of the Copenhagen Co’creation Network, Danish Design Association invited Ida Vesterdal, Partner at Via Design, to participate in Copenhagen Co’creation Summit and Seminar and to introduce co-creation in a number of articles. In the article “The right tools for the job” Liz Sanders, MakeTools.

The success or otherwise of co-creation depends to a large extent on whether we are able to utilize the knowledge and experience of participants and apply them to meet a specific challenge. To this end we can use a broad range of tools that aim to encourage individuals to contribute by drawing on their own experiences, both rational and emotional.

To learn more about what tools can be used and how they can be made to work, I have interviewed Liz Sanders, one of the participants at Copenhagen Co´creation. She is an expert in the use of tools that help people express their feelings, experiences and knowledge with a view to innovative development in a community setting. She develops and runs co-creation processes through her consultancy company, MakeTools, as well as doing concurrent research on the tools she works with.

NECESSARY PRECONDITIONS
To start with, Liz stresses that tools are only the tip of the iceberg. There are other, deeper levels which are necessary preconditions if the tools are to work at all. As Liz herself explains – on the basis of the model, ‘Exploring co-creation on a large scale’:

“For tools to be effective, you will need several other layers. ‘Tools’ is only the first step in the co-creation process. Tools need to be applied via methods which are often nested within more inclusive methodologies. The mindset with which the tools are applied is even more important than the methods or methodologies. In co-creation, you need to be working with the mindset that all people are creative and that they are able to produce creative things when given the tools and the stage on which to practice or perform. For example, I have seen good tools/methods fail in the hands of a person who did not actually believe that the people he gave the tools to would be creative with them. Then, in order for an organization to practice a culture of co-creation, the tools need to be applied via methods/methodologies and with the right mindset by people within the organization working together.” (more…)

Read the latest news from Copenhagen Co’creation here