Giving Compass' Take:

• The authors are investigating the role of co-creation in breakout innovation projects and how often that strategy is used to bring about solutions in philanthropy to global and social issues. 

• What are examples of co-creation projects that made a positive influence on society?

• Read the Aspen Institute's take on the effect of co-creation for social programs. 

Over the last decade, there has been an explosion of interest in collaboration, open innovation, and crowd engagement. Many companies are moving away from a model in which products and services are created through a closed, top-down, expert-biased process and toward open, crowdsourced, user-driven strategies. Nonprofits, philanthropists, and community groups are also embracing cocreation as a response to the challenge of tackling pressing problems in an increasingly complex world.

And yet, while the language of co-creation is en vogue, relatively few organizations are applying co-creative strategies to innovate boldly. We celebrate the solutions resulting from design competitions and open innovation processes, yet few of the results lead to systems change or profoundly shake up what is considered possible.

Despite all the rhetoric of cocreation as an important tool for innovation, it appears that the majority of such efforts are doing little to challenge the basic structures of problem-solving. Meanwhile, our world cries out for designs that reimagine the way we do pretty much everything if we are to solve pressing problems like climate change, extreme inequality, and poverty.

After a two-year interdisciplinary research study exploring co-creative design processes in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, we have concluded that only a small percentage of co-creation efforts are actually creating systems-changing solutions aligned with the stated needs and priorities of the participants, let alone with the possibilities for innovation that such approaches offer. We were left wondering why the majority of cocreation endeavors fall short of their promise and potential, so we set out to find an answer.

The Five Practices of Breakout Innovation:

  1. Share Power
  2. Prioritize Relationships
  3. Leverage Heterogeneity
  4. Legitimize all possible ways of Knowing
  5. Prototype Early and Often

Read the full article about breakout innovation by  Joanna Levitt Cea & Jess Rimington at Stanford Social Innovation Review