Co-creating end-user roles. Understanding the new variety of user involvement in public sector innovation

Abstract

Co-creation has become a major concern in science and public policy. It aims to give a more central role to end users in producing (public sector) innovation outcomes. This leads to a new variety of end user roles in innovation activities and poses challenges for both practitioners and policy makers. We offer an in-depth, comparative analysis of such end user roles in three cases of co-creative public sector innovation across Europe. We argue that the definition of particular end user roles is crucial in shaping both the inclusiveness and outcomes of co-creative innovation. We offer a typology of end user roles and their respective limits and potentials with regard to co-creation. Our analysis suggests that, for co-creation to produce useful and legitimate outcomes, the process by which roles are assigned to and negotiated with end users must be part of the co-creative process itself.

Knowledge Innovation Ecosystem for the Promotion of User-Centre Health Innovations: Living Lab Methodology and Lessons Learned Through the Proposal of Standard Good Practices

“…Contrarily to what was suggested in the literature [1, 57], when evaluating the end-users’ backgrounds (Figure 5 and Table 4), it was not possible to guarantee, for all the KIEs, that there was one representative from each background classification sector (Government, NGO, Medical, company, school, research and citizen). Although, citizen end-users are seen as valid and important providers and producers of knowledge that shape innovation [87], in both TheBrainLL and RemoteMointLab there was no indication that there would be an additional benefit in having them present during the LL program. For example, in TheBrainLL the presence of patient end-users ( i.e .…”

“…As demonstrated in Figure 6, the advisor was the most prevailing role in the TheBrainLL and RemotMonitLab, contrarily to PCCLL where the tester role was predominant. However, it is important to highligh, as stated by Lipp et al [87], this participation is not binary being either active or passive, it comes in different types, some more active and others less so. In the LLs studied, the same end-user could assume multiple roles.…”

“…As an example in the RemotMonitLab, the psychiatrist end-user not only provided professional advice but also allowed himself to be a test subject of a solution. There was no co-creation (denoted as the process by which these actors come together and the mode of collaboration between them [87]) in any of the LLs considered in this study. Hence, the end-users did not assume the role of initiators (collaboration in the ideation process) and developers (development/building of innovation).…”

The societal role of universities and their alliances: the case of the EuroTeQ Engineering University

“…Already in 1963, Clark Kerr introduced the term multiversity to recognise the great variety of activities and societal functions universities are expected to fulfil in addition to research and education (Kerr, 1963). As part of the so-called "third mission" (Papadimitriou, 2020;Compagnucci & Spigagelli, 2020), universities contribute to regional development (Pinheiro et al, 2012), engage in lifelong learning activities, host public lectures, advise local government or other stakeholders and catalyse academic entrepreneurship (Siegel & Wright, 2015) and a wide range of other co-creation activities (Ramaswamy, 2011;Berghaeuser & Hoelscher, 2020;Lipp et al, 2022;Trencher et al, 2014).…”

Maintaining innovation: How to make sewer robots and innovation policy work in Barcelona

“…PDTI epitomized several recent trends in innovation policy, all centered on the role of the state and the public sector in innovation. These include, for example, a growing interest in ‘Public Procurement of Innovation’ (PPI), the development of innovative solutions to public problems by state entities, often articulated in the form of ‘challenges’, in ‘Co-Creation’, the bringing-together of diverse stakeholders to foster socially beneficial innovation outcomes (Lipp et al, 2023; Ruess et al, 2023), and in ‘Mission-Driven Innovation’, the orchestration of public and private sector activities around ‘missions’ to steer innovation towards publicly beneficial outcomes (Kuhlmann & Rip, 2018; Mazzucato, 2019). The particular case of Barcelona sewer robotics experiments was seen as a trial of a potential template for how the European Union could identify crucial challenges from the public sector that could be solved with the help of innovation (such as robots) in the future.…”