Workshops and Sessions

Workshop: Participatory strategies in co-creative innovation
Whether deliberately or implicitly, different approaches to co-creation can impact several aspects of the co-creation process: from setting up roles and expectations, fostering motivation and maintaining commitment, fostering cooperative behavior or utilization and exploitation of knowledge.

The aim of the workshop is to be an interactive session where practitioners can discuss their experience in collaboration with different stakeholders and to share their insights with academic researchers who are working on similar issues. What strategies can you share on stakeholder engagement, participation, and inclusion? What were the interesting things that emerged from this multi-stakeholder engagement? What were the limits and challenges? What do ideal participants look like, and why?

Session: How does money matter in renewable energy cooperatives?
This session focuses on the questions: How do energy cooperatives co-create with their members? What are the challenges and barriers for financing energy cooperatives projects in different countries? How do cooperatives co-create funding systems for their investment project? What is the role of housing cooperatives in Eastern Europe to speed up renewable energy transition in the region? To which extent cooperatives use co-operation to make decisions in the financial area? What kind of value bring co-creation to urban energy projects in renewable energy cooperatives?
Session leads will introduce empirical data and conceptual insights of a three country comparison to kick off the discussion.

Workshop: Co-creating a European co-creation roadmap
In the session, we present first results of the roadmapping activities in SCALINGS and aim to generate a debate of academics and practitioners about what they see as essential for the future of co-creation in Europe.

Session: Power, subjectivity and truth in co-creation
Co-creation does not take place in a ‘power vacuum’. Participants in co-creation are (dis)empowered in different ways (e.g. by access to resources, networks of influence, skills, knowledge, political influence etc.). The aim of this session is to analyse and critically assess the power dynamics contributing to the shaping of co-creation in practice, in particular the interplay between co-creative settings and the existing organisation of innovation (eco)systems.
This session invites contributions. A call for contributions will follow in September.

Session: Call for contributions: Co-creation and character
Participation is becoming a greater part of our economy, governance and innovation practices. Participative projects have sprung from movements to democratize technology, innovation, product design, architecture and town planning. The participation of citizens or end-users in the design of products and services is often also advantageous for businesses. Participative innovation may be a better way to address complex global issues like climate change, the need for a sustainable energy transition and the robotization of the workforce. While participating in innovative practices can be valuable, it can also be demanding. Participative processes can also be slow. For participative innovation to make a positive contribution, a change in people’s mentality is required.
This session invites contributions. A call for contributions will follow in September.

Workshop: Empowerment in co-creation
The aim of this workshop is to explore co-creation empowering potential, and to reflect on how concepts such as access to resources, agency, power, structure, and so forth, play a role in the co-creation process. The workshop invites researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers to share their research, experience, and visions for co-creation’s potential to engage society, industry, academia, and civil society in innovation (in the form of abstracts, short proposals, manifestos, research agendas, and so forth).

Workshop: Co-creation and Responsible Research and Innovation
The aim of this workshop is to invite both academics and practitioners to share their experience on where the “theory to practice” works well, and where it didn’t. We invite participants to reflect on the more “human” side of innovation by asking questions such as:
• What is the role of social and economic inequalities of stakeholders in RRI and co-creation?
• How does power influence collaboration?
• What can RRI and co-creation do to address issues of power and inequalities?

Session: Creating New Markets through PPI
A central goal of PPI is to create new markets and to contribute to economic growth. To achieve this two things are essential:

1. To design the public procurement procedure transparently and non-discriminatory. This guarantees open competition amongst the bidders. The procedure shall provide the necessary ‘market-pull’, incentivising the development of an innovative solution without foreclosing the market.
2. Smart allocation of the intellectual property rights linked to the public contract and the developed innovation. I.e. to transfer them to the participating economic operators (leaving this to the public buyers would typically stifle innovation). At the same time, it is necessary to require the participating economic operators to licence the rights to certain third parties under fair and reasonable market conditions. This avoids supplier lock-in (=distorted markets).

Dragana Damjanovic, Iris Eisenberger and Arzu Sedef (BOKU, Austria) will start with the current status of their research and will highlight the challenges of the legal rules relevant to these two issues face. Practitioners involved in PPI procedures will share their experience on these issues followed by a panel discussion: “Open legal issues on PPI?”.

Workshop: Co-Creation Facilities and challenge-based learning
Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) is an innovative type of learning where students work on real open-end challenges that have a direct impact on our world (eg related to the United Nations' sustainable development goals), and where students become owners of their learning. In addition to deepening disciplinary knowledge and skills in context, students learn to co-create with various disciplines and stakeholders and deal with complex, open processes. CCF like TU/e innovation Space, facilitate this new type of learning and support it’s upscaling. The workshops aims to learn how other CCF are organized for co-creation and it’s upscaling to more students, to mixed groups of students (different levels, universities, other higher education institutes, nationalities, …) and how this can add to ongoing co-creation processes and their upscaling.

Workshop: New roles within universities in new co-creation processes
Quadruple helix projects change the role of all involved partners. For universities and other knowledge institutions, this has large implications on the way to collaborate externally with companies, governments and citizens. It also changes internal collaboration and management. This workshop invites presidents of two European universities, together with other stakeholders to discuss with the workshop participants how universities and knowledge institutions can best answer the present-day challenges for universities in co-creation processes. 

Workshop: Challenges in upscaling large co-creation projects
Large-scale co-creation comes with many challenges. A multitude of partners and participants means that facilitating co-creation and the contact between the partners can be very demanding. The purpose of this session is to learn about the challenges of co-creation from collaborators in large co-creation practices that have had to deal with these challenges. Problems that the collaborators face will be discussed in an attempt to help solve them. The workshop should not have a purely academic output. The collaborators participating should also be able to learn from each other. The workshop will be facilitated in such a way that the collaborators can take home some practical advice for their co-creation practice. The results of the workshop will also be recorded in writing for research purposes. The research output should be aimed at helping other similar large projects, so that co-creation can be upscaled more responsibly.

Session: Co-creation and Assemblages
Recent theoretisations have approached the concept of co-creation through the Deleuzian notion of ‘assemblage’. From this theoretical angle, interactional creation is enacted by means of interactions of “agencial assemblages”, where agencing engagements and structuring organizations enable and constrain interactions. This session welcomes presentations that contribute to this conceptualization of co-creation in terms of “assemblages” from theoretical as well as empirical perspectives.
This session invites contributions. A call for contributions will follow in September.

Workshop: “Innovation Phase 0: Co-Creation Before Innovation Begins”
Co-creation processes have to start somewhere. Before this point 0, a lot needs to happen. This workshop focuses on the processes that occur before the co-creation can take off.

Session: Living labs and the ethics of data
Living labs constitute a laboratory but also a public or private space. While some living labs grant ownership of the data collected to the participants, the very concept of living lab creates an expectation for participants to share this data. Data collection in living labs therefore raises many ethical questions regarding privacy, autonomy and trust. This session brings together practitioners and academics to discuss these important topics.