Special meeting of the co-creation ecosystem on its first anniversary

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The Basque Co-creation Ecosystem launched by Arantzazulab has just held its fourth meeting. The working day, held at the headquarters of the laboratory (Gandiaga Topagunea), commemorated the first anniversary of the ecosystem. In collaboration with 30 Basque agents, Arantzazulab started a year ago to build the Basque co-creation ecosystem.

Following the social innovation approach promoted by Arantzazulab (Collaborative Governance and Innovation in Governance for transformation) the co-creation ecosystem has a  twofold objective:

  1. To connect co-creation spaces, knowledge and stakeholders in the Basque Country   in order to raise awareness on the existing knowledge, share resources and discuss learnings together.
  2. To  promote spaces for experimentation in order to  foster creativity and generate new knowledge.

Since 2021, the ecosystem has carried out, among other initiatives,  3 working sessions , different reflections to build collective intelligence around co-creation, has connected with international stakeholders, and has promoted the competition for co-creation experiments, which has led to the launch of two experiments:

The aim of the meeting, held on Wednesday, was to present the evolution and reflection of these two experiments; to report on the provisional conclusions of the Thinkers in Residence research by Arantzazulab and connect them with the work done in the ecosystem.

As far as the experiments are concerned, the people promoting them explained the evolution and lessons learned so far: ” We are working in parallel on two lines of work: on the one hand, the co-creation space for collaboration between Farapi and Medialab Tabakalera and, on the other, the work on wellbeing with young people. In the latter space we have used techniques as diverse as the wheel, just one, dixit, covisage, fanzine, video games and collage”,said the representative of the Galdera Ikurrak experiment. Likewise, Galdakao 2030 experiment’s team explained that “to develop a co-creation process we need people who believe that they will be the drivers of change, people with high doses of motivation”

The provisional conclusions of the Thinkers in Residence  research by Arantzazulab

After the first part of the meeting, the provisional conclusions of the study Thinkers in Residence of Arantzazulab, were presented by the international researcher Michelle Zucker. In the presentation, she explained the context of the transformation and then presented the key ideas of the specific international cases analysed. After the presentation, the participants reflected on the four hypotheses of the research, relating co-creation with the work done in the ecosystem.

Arantzazulab will give shape later this year to the manifesto that it started working on in March with the network of agents. “The aim of the manifesto is to define who we are, what is the mission of the ecosystem, what are our commitments and what are the roles we can take. Being an incipient Ecosystem, the commitments of the members are linked to the conditions of initial cooperation, the characteristics of the work dynamics and the way of developing things”, emphasises Ione Ardaiz, head of social innovation projects at Arantzazulab. The following co-creation ecosystem session will take place in autumn, and beforehand, we will share the lessons learned and the work of the co-creation ecosystem experiments through the blogs. We will continue connecting the Thinkers in residence research with the content developed in the co-creation ecosystem and we will enrich the co-creation ecosystem elements with the knowledge captured in the international examples.