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Designing co-creation settings - a possible approach By Rex Degnegaard, Assistant Professor Being a new and rapidly emerging concept co-creation is subject to arbitrary interpretations, hit-and-miss operationalization, uses and abuses. As is the case for other rapidly emerging concepts, co-creation sometimes serves as hype, buzz word, or advertorials for practitioners as well as researchers. Such arbitrary adaptation – or hijacking – of the concept to promote other organizational initiatives and agendas definitely is part of the stoke we are seeing around co-creation these years. However, there is more to co-creation than hype and buzz. Co-creation holds a potential for organizations to further unfold its
capabilities with other organizations, institutions, and actors. Furthermore, co-creation can serve as a vehicle for addressing higher-level challenges such as community-wide challenges, industry-wide challenges, societal and even global challenges. Thus, on one hand, co-creation can be a vehicle for the individual organization in its pursuit of unfolding its potential in the larger field. On the other hand, cocreation can be a vehicle for addressing larger-scale challenges by engaging individual stakeholders in co-creation settings.