THEME: SOCIAL INNOVATION IN PUBLIC SERVICES—INNOVATING ‘CO-CREATIVE’ RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SERVICES, CITIZENS AND COMMUNITIES?
Guest editors: Sue Baines, Rob Wilson, Inga Narbutaite Aflaki, Aldona Wiktorska-Święcka, Andrea Bassi and Harri Jalonen
Editorial: Innovating ‘co-creative’ relationships between services, citizens and communities

Public services face growing pressure to innovate but there is little agreement how this can be achieved (Hartley, 2014). Social innovation is explicitly about addressing human needs and its place in public policy is well established (Marques et al., 2017; Sabato et al., 2017). This Public Money & Management (PMM) theme puts a spotlight on the intersection of social innovation and co-creation. Co-creation is a more recent entrant to policy agenda than social innovation but also appears to have achieved the status of an orthodoxy (Osborne et al., 2016; Torfing et al., 2019). In the context of public services, co-creation is characterized as ‘active involvement of end-users in various stages of the production process’ (Voorberg et al., 2015, p. 1335). There are variations in detail and emphases vis-à-vis the longer established term ‘co-production’ (Brandsen & Honingh, 2018; Bovaird et al., 2019). A common thread in co-creation is that people typically called ‘service users’ or ‘beneficiaries’ become seen as asset holders with legitimate knowledge about what their services should comprise (Fox et al., 2021; Wiktorska-Święcka, 2021).

In addition to meeting human needs, social innovations are said to transform relationships and increase people’s resources and capabilities (Moulaert et al., 2013). Social innovation as an idea has roots in various traditions including, but not limited to, innovation in industry and technology (Bassi et al., 2019). In commercial innovation a distributed knowledge base including the active contribution of consumers has come to the fore (Chesbrough, 2011; Curley, 2016). Public sector and commercial variations on innovation have in common the opening of innovation processes to a broader range of people and organizations. Empirical studies of real-life social innovations worldwide have highlighted co-creation tropes, such as revision of professional roles, collective empowerment and who gets to define what matters (Evers & Brandsen, 2016; Oosterlynck et al., 2019; Narbutaité Aflaki & Lindh, 2021). Recent evidence is emerging from places hardest hit by the pandemic that civil society organizations, public agencies and informal groups of citizens have found new ways to interconnect and experiment (Agostini, 2022). Co-creation, in other words, appears to align closely with claims in the (social) innovation literature that the roles of innovator, producer and consumer overlap or merge (Grimm et al., 2013).

We present five research articles in this PMM theme with empirical settings across sectors including social care, economic development, and criminal justice. The authors report and analyse innovative co-creative initiatives involving marginalized and stigmatized groups (prisoners, urban racialized minorities, rural poor populations including Roma). There are also three new development articles highlighting specific areas of innovation, and four short debate articles that offer thoughtful provocations. We group all these contributions under three sub-themes as follows, although there is some overlap between them

Unequal power dynamics and the ‘hard to reach’

Temidayo Eseonu (2022) draws on the politics of difference to explore how power asymmetries impact on the ability of racially minoritized citizens to voice their needs. She evidences some success in an experimental intervention in a UK city to enable design inputs from so-called ‘hard-to-reach’ young people into employment support services. More radical, innovative change, however, would be needed to influence the patterns of power that fail to include large parts of societies. With the research article by Csoba and Sipos (2022), we turn to a co-creation initiative for improving household livelihoods in Hungarian villages beset by multiple disadvantages. The modernization of public services in that country is distinctive and contradictory, with local leaders expected to be entrepreneurial innovators while central government constrains their room for manoeuvre and strengthens welfare dependency. Against this unpromising background, experimental strategies empowering local communities proved difficult, but not impossible.

Gibbon and Rutter (2022) report how social enterprises enabled social innovation and co-creative practices in UK prisons. Criminal justice would seem a particularly hostile environment both for co-creation (given that service users are under compulsion) and for innovation in the context of risk management and regulation. Gibbon and Rutter nevertheless demonstrate the power of transformational learning through innovation and co-creation, made possible especially by relationships within social enterprise activities. Two debate articles enrich the theme of combatting unequal power by demonstrating successful, imaginative ways of involving people who lack resources. Trowbridge and Willoughby (2022) draw attention to how digital storytelling can connect public services with citizens, especially those who are rarely heard. Paul Hine (2022) makes a case for participatory arts as an innovative means to improve co-creation processes through shared human experience.

Multiple agencies and sectors

Hardyman et al. (2022) introduce the term ‘innovative imagination’ to denote public service practitioners’ increased capacity to deploy new tools and skillsets. Drawing on evaluation of a public service innovation programme in the UK, they propose a service ecosystems perspective to incorporate the knowledge and experiences of citizens, service users and wider stakeholders. The new development article by FitzGerald et al. (2022) unpicks the misapplied rhetoric of co-creation in English local government. In that context, fragmentation brought about by privatization and austerity has led to widespread enthusiasm for new forms of collaboration. Collaborative structures take many forms but, although often framed in the language of co-creation, only rarely change the power to define problems and direct action. Bassi’s (2022) debate article also reflects on multiple actors, agencies and sectors, noting that, given its stress on the direct participation of citizens, co-creation can overlook professionals and put civil society roles under strain.

Innovations to enable co-creation as an ongoing process

Kadri Kangro and Katri-Liis Lepik (2022) touch on the roots of co-creation and innovation in technology and commerce in their research article. ‘Hackathons’ are a well-established means to facilitate innovation through intensive, fast-paced collaboration, originally by prototyping in the IT sector. The authors show how social hackathons for public service innovation in a rural area of Estonia succeeded in adapting the format to mobilize people from different backgrounds around co-defined problems. There was some co-design of practical solutions and also evidence of movement towards new local contexts where experiments and their spaces are favoured. Williams (2022) debate article contends that service providers typically adopt consultative rather than collaborative approaches to co-creation and proposes participatory budgeting experiments as a means to bring about change. Two new development articles shed light on adaptions from digital innovation for co-creation. Jamieson and Martin (2022) recount how an open-source, web-based tool using living lab methodology was refined through experiences with real-life pilot projects across Europe to support the modelling of co-creation with input questions and prompts. In common with the majority of commentary on co-creation and social innovation, the articles in this PMM theme are generally positive and optimistic. Harri Jalonen (2022) reminds us that bad consequences can follow from good intentions and proposes a novel ‘wicked game’ approach to cope with the complexities.

Taken together, the articles in our theme take stock of the emerging evidence base, conceptual developments, and policy lessons. Contributions from Estonia, Finland, Hungary and the UK show, in various ways, how co-creation and social innovation may be related in terms of intentions, principles, practices and outcomes. Yet it is uncertain how sustainable such changes might be (Wilson et al., 2012). Recent events remind us how hard it is to foresee what the future may hold for citizens, communities and their services. We conclude with the reflection that apparently concrete solutions built on sunny days can all too soon be washed away like sandcastles when the tide comes in, making it imperative to look for approaches and platforms that will nurture ongoing adaptation.

Acknowledgement and disclaimer

This editorial draws on a project entitled ‘Co-creation of Service Innovation in Europe’ (CoSIE). CoSIE received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 770492. The content of the publication reflects the authors’ views and the managing agency cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.