Traditional innovation often follows a linear, top-down approach where companies create, and customers consume. This model, however, frequently misses the mark when it comes to expressing the full potential of collaborative efforts. Co-creation, a dynamic, participatory model that actively involves all stakeholders (whether employees, customers, patients, partners, and communities), is emerging as a transformative approach to the innovation process.
Indeed, this dynamic stakeholder approach to innovation contrasts strongly with traditional commercial attitudes to innovation. While typically this sees internal teams design solutions for end users, co-creation methods replace them with a much broader participatory approach to stakeholder involvement – both in defining a problem and proposing and testing solutions. It is more complex than simple science to business (S2B) collaboration, due to both the diversity of stakeholders involved and also their expectations of how the results will be used and who should control and influence these.
When is co-creation used?
Co-creation is used in many scenarios and can have different types of impact. They include:
- Enterprise co-creation: typically used by companies to design products and services that will resonate more strongly with end users. This approach often requires the hire of external individuals or the formation of small external teams who bid for, and work on a problem for the enterprise for the duration of a project. Often, the enterprise will own any new IP and the individual or team will simply be remunerated or non-financially rewarded for their work. The main aim here for an enterprise is to increase the share of its profits.
- Co-creation to address societal challenges: increasingly used by public sector organisations to help them source and develop solutions to societal problems. These can include addressing local challenges such as transportation, pollution, natural resource management and increasing demands on limited supply of energy and water. The main goal is to realise societal impact through the solution. In this scenario a wide and diverse group of stakeholders may be involved in developing a solution and so will need to build trust between each other to ensure that they will share their ideas. Ownership of the final outcome or solution can be complex and may have to be transferred to a commercial third party for realisation.
- Healthcare co-creation involving Public Patient Involvement (PPI): increasingly used by organisations who fund and manage healthcare. PPI co-creation is intended to involve patients, people who access services, carers, charities, community groups and others, to bring diverse perspectives into innovation in healthcare. The main goal is to improve healthcare, but it can also be to drive down costs. As with co-creation for societal challenges, the diverse co-creators can feel highly invested in the solution. Understanding and agreeing with how it will be implemented and by whom, can affect their willingness to fully engage in the co-creation process. Transparency of outcomes can be a big issue for stakeholders.
The IMPAC3T-IP Toolbox to support co-creation
As part of the upcoming IMPAC3T-IP toolbox for IP stakeholders, tools that will help different organisations recruit and manage diverse stakeholder pools, build trust between individuals who need to share ideas at an early stage and secure IP rights that can be transferred onwards to solution-providers through licensing, are also being developed.
IMPAC3T-IP is also aware that co-creation to address societal challenges often requires innovative business models to be identified to help sustain results. Tools to help organisations explore how to increase the transparency of licensing arrangements will be included, as will examples of how others have successfully transferred and sustained co-created solutions.
Overall, the co-creation tools within the toolbox aim to support a diversity of organisations to consider and adopt this approach to innovation. It will help ensure that companies can become more competitive, and that solution-providers and diverse stakeholders can engage with each other in confidence, all the while leading to impact on the economy, the environment and society.