Re-defined relationships with individuals supported by services

In CoSIE we see co-creation as a collaborative activity that reduces power imbalances and aims to enrich and enhance the value in public service offerings.

Co-creation implies that value of service offering is enhanced in the interactions between participants.

Value may be understood in terms of increased well-being and shared visions for the common good that lead to more inclusive policies, strategies, regulatory frameworks or new services.

Participation and influence are two major co-creative principles. Co-creation requires that individuals supported by the service must be able to participate, either directly or indirectly, and exert some influence in service development. This relates to all stages of service production from co-initiation to co-design, co-decision, co-implementation and co-evaluation. On a system level, possibilities to participate in questioning and exploring service delivery intentions, status and improvements implies co-governance.

Below, we illustrate from the CoSIE experiences how and in what roles those individuals who are (or would be) supported by the service may be enrolled in services and their governance. The pilots exemplify some energetic and innovative ways in fostering new ways to interact, new service relationships and ways of working across sectors and agencies.

Co-initiation:

By co-initiation we mean joint decision to initiate an agreed change in extant service or complementary service. Both hackathons (Estonia, Hungary, Finland) and other dialogue platforms such as reflective manager sessions (Sweden) or repetitive dialogues with stakeholders and service beneficiaries (Spain, Italy, Holland, Poland etc.) about service improvements served to settle on the changes to be initiated. In all cases these decisions required managerial support. Meeting other stakeholders and citizens actually meant a more vivid articulation of needs and this in particular pushed for change action.

Co-design – hackathons or other events

By co-design we mean involving service beneficiaries and stakeholders in identifying needs and planning how new service offers can be designed or extant services redesigned (improved) within the given regulatory and other limitations. This may also imply planning of the use of resources. In the Finnish case for example this has implied identifying based on user narratives new profiles of marginalized youngsters subject to social services and planning the implementation of new public sector training’s to encounter such targeted groups in co-creative way. In the Spanish case it implied redefining the needs of unemployed individuals or in Hungarian case the self-sustainment needs in rural communities. Often, the user perceptions of their needs challenged the professionals and a common ground had to be reached in conversations (see for example the Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Finish cases).

To be able to co-design we need supportive governance. In some pilots, an expression of the conversational and co-creative governance was facilitating events (lasting about half a day to two days) where users and stakeholders met over a shorter period of time and engaged together in intensive activity to generate, explore, prioritise and test early stage service ideas or improvements. Events of this type are intense, enjoyable and highly effective for generating new ideas with people who would not normally interact. Such participatory co-design process encourages initiatives coming from either public or private sector, and also ideas overriding the traditional logic of governmental structures (social, educational, commercial etc.). Orchestrating these events are examples of collaborative, co-creative governance as it implies a asking questions about broader reach out, organizing access and exposing participants in creative ways to the experiences and skills of others.

More participants thus are included in conversational and co-creative service governance by asking questions such as “How is the service landscape experienced?” “Is this what we intended” “is this desirable” “Can it be improved?” during these events. Examples of such intensive co-design thinking, tools and platforms  can be found in Estonia, Finland, Poland, and Spain.

• In the Estonian pilot, tackling the problem of social service needs in countryside the hackathon was found to be a suitable method for problem analysis and idea generation. They found that researching the problem was very challenging, but gaining new understandings the problem from different perspectives was one of the most valuable outcomes of the hackathon.
• As the Dutch pilot put it “the co-creation meant actually changing the agenda of what we thought we are going to do, and that was powerful.”

Facilitating spaces: In some pilots, more stable physical spaces were devoted co-creative meetings on regular basis.

• For example, in Valencia, Spain it took the form of co-created space for co-design and co-working. In Netherlands an apartment has been jointly transformed into a ‘living room for the neighbourhood’ or in Sweden, Jönköping first-line managers had regular joint reflective meetings in the working spaces called “reflection rooms”. These meetings embodied the spirit of co-creation in that everyone had a voice in practically everything that occurred there.

Digital technologies have been successfully applied in some cases to help to facilitate the reach out (Estonia, Finland, Sweden), utilizing platforms and data for conversations, or in sustaining interactions and building relationships (Spain). 

• In the Estonian pilot, the name and style of “hackathon” had a direct connection to the IT sector. The events attracted people from this sector to participate who, knowing the background and origin of this method, came up with service ideas based on ICT tools or other digital solutions. The hackathon method itself opened up to innovative solutions (including digital ones) to support encounters between people from very different background and sharing of ideas. In some cases, participants were supported to utilize open data on the official statistics of their region and each team were handed out the data related to their allocated topic and instructed to use it in their conversations.

Co-implementation (co-determination)

In some of the pilots governance has devolved in ways that intended beneficiaries – including vulnerable end-users and their networks – were not merely consulted or even invited to participate but become part of the decision-making process.

• In the Reggio pilot (Italy) the stakeholder “consulting committee” (the name “consulting” rather underplays its significant role in governance) has become central to the generation of ideas and defining the guidelines of the piloting innovative services for children and their families. Another example form disability services in Jönköping, Sweden, illustrates how users were not only consulted (through focus groups and community reporting tool) to identify some service improvements for piloting work but also gradually involved in co-creation by changing service practices, such as co-determining their service implementation plans and tailoring their daily delivery.

Co-evaluation (evaluation with the aim to improve)

Any project of co-creation absolutely needs periodic moments of co-evaluation about each phase of the process, in order to facilitate the formation of a common horizon among the stakeholders based on variety of experiences. The co-evaluation becomes, then, an ongoing reflexive exercise that permits to think about the actions implemented and the results achieved and deciding whether changing some strategies or continuing along the established path. Co-evaluation becomes an essential part in the governance of emerging service innovations and improvements.

• For example, utilizing Community reporting method or focus groups based on lived experiences allows assessing how stakeholders, and especially marginalized individuals supported by the services, value the ongoing service innovations or improvements. A demonstration of proceeding by trial-and-error is given by the Estonian pilot, which needed to accept the failure of using particular intermediaries and data and decided to proceed differently. Or the Spanish service model that was constantly evolving. The Swedish pilot has started new meeting routines with citizens with disabilities and in each case provided citizens opportunities to assess those.

While it may be challenging to involve individuals supported by service in co-evaluation CoSIE examples show how their perspectives may be particularly valuable for continuously reshaping service offerings to enhance their relevance, meaningfulness and value.