Shaping the Co-Creation Ecosystem: Journey and lessons learned in 2023

The Co-creation Ecosystem was launched in 2021. Together with a variety of Basque stakeholders, we are building a space to ideate and put in practice new ways of connecting and generating knowledge. From the beginning and up to now, we have held 7 working sessions, connected with 30 organisations with experience in co-creation in the Basque Country, developed 2 experiments (Galdera Ikurrak and Galdakao2030) that have generated knowledge, and built an ecosystem made up of 5 working groups.

In 2022, we laid the foundations of the ecosystem: we agreed on the mission of the co-creation ecosystem, we connected with international experiences, and we worked on capturing co-creation knowledge from the conducted experiments as well as from previous experiences. We defined the following elements as the basis of the path we want to follow around generating new co-creation knowledge: criteria, ways of thinking and attitudes; process phases and actions; governance, roles, and responsibilities; methods and tools; developmental evaluation; ethics.

In 2022 we captured two key lessons learned. The first was that the decision-making capacity and leadership were assumed by a single organisation, Arantzazulab, because the experiments were funded by the Innovation Laboratory. Therefore, the shared leadership that characterises an ecosystem was not being fulfilled and something had to change to make it possible. The second lesson learned was that the organisations that did not participate in the experiments came to the working sessions and covered the costs for their own time, and their contribution to the ecosystem was made with their own resources. In order for the ecosystem to be sustainable in the long term, this also needed to be reconsidered.

For this reason, in the call promoted by Arantzazulab in 2022, it was proposed a new model. This has been suggested so that the diverse stakeholders that make up this innovative ecosystem keep it sustainable over time, working in an efficient way, keeping it aligned with its final objective and collaborating on a common goal. We intended to take a new step, experimenting with a new funding model to maintain the structure and increase its impact over time: instead of covering projects’ costs, resources have been allocated to promote the ecosystem itself; these resources have been shared among the beneficiaries of the call made at the end of 2022 and who are active agents of the ecosystem in 2023.

The ecosystem actors were selected based on the following criteria: 

• Experience in co-creation and practical work in this field (knowledge of Arantzazulab’s co-creation ecosystem and experience in this field were positively evaluated).
• Evaluation of the contribution: Quality of the contribution to the development and enrichment of the ecosystem.
• Motivation and experience to add value to the ecosystem.
• Language: Ability to work in Basque.
• Not developing inappropriate practices.
• Compliance with the procedure and deadlines of the call for proposals.

The beneficiary stakeholders of the call were 14 and, in 2023, 20 people are involved in building an innovative network. We are working in 5 working groups with different roles: the orientation and promotion group (working on the ecosystem strategy, mission and governance model); the experimentation group (designing and carrying out co-creation experiments); the networks and mapping group (making the ecosystem visible and creating connections); the observation and evaluation group (measuring the impact of the ecosystem and the processes’ evaluation); and the connectors group (ensuring cohesion between the working groups).

In the Arantzazulab website’s blogpost ‘Experimentation with new models of collaboration among different stakeholders in Arantzazulab’, we share the steps we are taking at the beginning, with new models of collaboration between different actors. In the coming months we want to share the work developed by each of the working groups, and to this end we will publish different blogposts. This is the first of the blogposts detailing the journey we have been on in the co-creation ecosystem and with the description of each working group.

The co-creation ecosystem members are: Arantzazulab, Apitropik, Beta, Be&Lab, Colabora, Elhuyar, Emun, Farapi, Impact Hub Donostia, JM aholkularitza, Kutxa fundazioa, Maraka, Pez estudio, Tipi and Wikitoki.