Bo's Update

Last friday I was at the Co-Creation Conference organized by Copenhagen Business School [CBS] and Danish Design Association [DDA]. The keynote speaker was Banny Banerjee from Design Program Director from D.School @Stanford, whom I heard and met when he was here last time in 2009. Just like then I was asked by DDA to take some photos, which can be seen above and more @my flickr as well as DDA’s ditto.

In his speech Banny highlighted the difference between collaboration (each contributing within ones own field) and co-creation (coming together and creating something new witch is bigger than the individual competences) as well as the needed pre-conditions for co-creation. He pointed out that co-creation is especially necessary if you’re trying to transform and solve complex challenges, and if you succeed you’re likely to have created a systemic win-win change for all the involved stakeholders. The difficulties is that in it’s nature co-creation is faced with obstacle such as differing goals, values, objectives, taxonomy etc. and therefore it is extremely important to focus not only on the quality of the outcome but also the quality of the process. If not, Banny claimed, you won’t be successful with co-creation.

The intense and compressed workshop which followed, highlighted these issues, as the participants was asked to co-create a co-creation process on various challenges. A big task to fulfill within a few hours in a team of strangers, but it worked perfectly to emphasize some of the important points, which we have to be aware of when co-creating in multidisciplinary teams with different stakeholders.

Most importantly we shouldn’t expect the process to me easy or conflict less, but rather accept and embrace the friction. The conflicts are often trapdoors to get to the next level in terms of the possibilities you’re dealing with.

Great insights from Banny Banerjee, who told me he was working on a book on the subject.