Scaling Up Co-creation? The Politics of Participatory Innovation Instruments

Abstract

Initiatives to stimulate innovation through “co-creation” among diverse actors are proliferating, spearheaded by a wave of new participatory policy instruments such as public procurement of innovation, co-creation facilities, or living labs, among others. Proponents argue that these instruments can include diverse knowledges and help steer innovation in socially beneficial directions. However, STS research has shown that participatory instruments do not merely engage, but performatively create publics, raising questions about representativeness, legitimacy, and power. Moreover, the mainstreaming of co-creation instruments in an increasingly standardized, ready-to-deploy fashion runs counter to the foundational premise of co-creation – i.e. that the goals, practices, and outcomes of innovation are highly situated and cannot be standardized across cultural, organizational, and regulatory contexts.

This panel aims to wrestle with the politics and practices of this new wave of “mainstreamed” co-creation instruments in innovation. We invite theoretical and empirical contributions on:

How is the global landscape of participatory innovation policy instruments changing? Which public bodies, economic or civil society actors driving this change?

Which new entanglements between objects, sites, publics, and concepts do these instruments create?

How do co-creation practices and outcomes differ across locations, scales, and technological domains? How are their benefits and risks envisioned differently?

How do these instruments reconfigure global and local political economies of innovation? Which forms of power, exclusion, and subjectivities are being enacted?

What are the avenues and limits for governing innovation more democratically through co-creation?

How can demand-side policy instruments such as public procurement support systems transformation related to grand challenges?

Chairs

• Meiken Hansen, Technical University of Denmark

• Cian O'Donovan, University College London

Individual Presentations

• Co-Design and Policy Playgrounds: Solving a Deficit in Process or Politics? - Trupti Patel, UCL; Melanie Smallman, University College London

• The Creative Region and Its Reservoir of Ideas: State-Led Participatory Innovation in Wallonia - Hadrien Macq, Université de Liège

• Investigating Co-Creation Practices in Public-Procurement-of-Innovation: A Danish Case - Meiken Hansen, Technical University of Denmark; Sophie Nyborg, Technical University of Denmark - DTU

• Techno-Politics of Co-Creation: On the Production of Interconnectability - Benjamin Lipp, Technical University Munich

• Crowd Dynamics, Co-Creation, and Values in Technology Innovation: A Case Study in Robotics - Gianluigi Viscusi, EPFL

Session Organizers

• Gunter Bombaerts, Eindhoven University of Technology

• Carlos Cuevas-Garcia, Technical University of Munich

• Kyriaki Papageorgiou, ESADE Business & Law School