Hosting co-creation

To facilitate co-creation, you need to understand the process; you need to have a good sense of the steps to take to be co-creative in the entire undertaking. On top of it is useful to have plenty of tools and methods in your back pocket, that can help you host that process.

But to be comfortable as a host and facilitator of co-creation, and to fully adopt co-creation as an approach, you also need to have some specific soft skills; certain mind sets. With those skills, you allow people to blossom and share their knowledge and ideas, while keeping an eye on the objectives that you set out to reach.

Working co-creatively will enable organisations to build a relationship with their local communities, with new visitors, with younger audiences or with people from diverse cultural backgrounds. An organisation needs to be able to host this bottom-up process, and can give some levels of freedom for the project to change course.

A co-creation process can enable organisations to:

• find a connection between groups that would normally not collaborate;
• raise awareness and sensitivity towards important issues with certain groups;
• create a safe space for sharing;
• create a common understanding;
• enable the creation of more layered and nuanced outcomes;
• build relationships between groups that exist well beyond the scope of a project.