Mitacs is a Canadian nonprofit research and innovation organization.
As a Mitacs Research Fellow, I traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland to conduct a research-creation project, producing a tool to help social innovators strategize co-creative partnerships.
Design
Research
May – July 2019 (3 months, full-time)
Lausanne, Switzerland
Co-Creating Societal Progress was a 3-month research-creation project carried out in close collaboration with Erica Mazerolle of Impact Hub Lausanne and Geneva.
The project had two objectives: to generate new knowledge on the topic of co-creating with governments (research); and to develop a tool to support future co-creation (create).
The final product was The Open Innovation Co-Creation Handbook: a communication tool for strategizing and organizing cross-sector collaborations.
Project origins The proposal came together in January 2019, while I was in the thick of my final project for the Co-Design Studio, a five-month intensive work-study program on participatory design at the HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht. With Globalink in mind, I reached out to Erica Mazerolle via email after reading about her work with social labs at Impact Hub on the internet. Identifying a number of shared research interests, I suggested we pool our complementary knowledge and backgrounds and develop the proposal together. It was accepted for funding in April, and the project began in May.
Partners In addition to securing an academic supervisor at my home university of Concordia (Dr. Carmela Cuccuzella), I was also required to find an academic supervisor in Switzerland. Fondation ZOEIN entered the picture after Dr. Sophie Swaton, professor/researcher at the University of Lausanne and President of ZOEIN, agreed to be my supervisor. Erica and I approached her on the basis of ZOEIN’s complementarity with Impact Hub: both support social entrepreneurs and government actors in developing solutions to societal challenges, but through a different set of offerings.
Pre-research With little time to waste, I began reading into the topic of designing with governments prior to funding approval. One particularly pertinent read was Designing With and Within Public Organizations, a 2019 book by Dutch consultant André Shaminée. This book introduced me to the concept of the “boundary spanner”: a person with a foot in two worlds, whose imbedded position in both affords them the unique ability to break silos and build bridges between different organizational cultures and ways of thinking. This concept became central to my research and approach.
In the pre-research phase I also reached out to Caroline Maessen, one of my former coaches from the Co-Design Studio. Our conversation consisted of sowing the seeds for a week-long research sojourn at the HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, as I was interested in conducting interviews in both Switzerland and the Netherlands alike.
Planning An early map as I sought to bring order to the multitude of ideas and possible directions available for further exploration. Gigamapping was one of my most important tools throughout the project, useful at any point where magnitude or complexity of information felt disorienting to me.
Physical, modular maps also came in handy during meetings, providing quick and accessible means for my collaborators to jump into my process and add their input.
Observation Preparing materials and sitting in on co-design workshops with Erica and her team. The Canton de Vaud had hired the Sustainable Living Lab as facilitators of a participatory process to redefine their energy transition strategy in an effort to reach their 2050 targets. Sessions were by invite-only and included stakeholders from across sectors.
Co-creation journey mapping is an interview method I developed for “Co-creating Societal Progress,” adapted from the Critical Decision Method. Focused on a specific instance, these interviews are in-depth and semi-structured. Events, interactions, and decisions made within a selected project are mapped onto a timeline, while open-ended questions are used to explore the relevant conditions surrounding these events and decisions.
You can download the method here.
Insight maps Identifying themes, patterns, and relationships in the findings from the 11 interviews I conducted with the co-creation journey mapping method. Version 1 with the post-it notes was synthesized into version 2, which was taken to meetings for feedback and further refined before being incorporated into the Handbook.
ideation Meeting with Sophie and Erica to discuss a format for the final product. Rather than writing a paper about my findings, I wanted to create something of use to practitioners in day-to-day settings which could be easily transported, laid out on a table, or given away.
prototyping I was inspired by handheld guides such as the Swiss maps I found at transit hubs, and decided to go with a similar fold-out mechanism. The result was all the real estate of four sheets of paper which collapsed to fit in the palm of the hand.
The Open Innovation Co-Creation Handbook was produced to support the development of creative solutions to complex, “wicked” problems, and positions open innovation co-creation as an inclusive and effective means of doing so. In open innovation’s “quadruple helix” model of collaboration, projects involving the four sectors of government, academia, industry and civil society allow for the unique strengths of one sector to account for the unique constraints of another. Complementary to this, co-creation necessitates that all collaborating parties have ample opportunity to provide creative input so as to produce a collectively-generated outcome reflective of everyone’s needs and priorities. When these two theories come together in practice, complex problems find complex solutions.
conclusion I produced 24 books total, granting 8 copies each for Impact Hub Lausanne, Fondation ZOEIN, and myself. A final presentation was held for Erica and I to present the tool and my process, which was attended by leaders from Impact Hub Lausanne and Geneva. Impact Hub decided to do a second print for an additional 60 copies. The Handbook was also presented as an open-source communication tool in the international Impact Hub Maker's Digest, and introduced to interested leaders of other Impact Hubs from around the world in a second meeting over Zoom.
