News

Evaluating experiences of online co-creation

The first roll-out of our online co-creation evaluation projects was done at the IoTXchange network meeting in Razlog on April 29th. A combination of seven semi-structured interviews with project partners’ staff and an electronic survey to stakeholders yielded interesting results – first impressions on the experience of remote work and co-creation during the pandemic.

Overall, the feeling was that the forced transition had been a shock at first, but different ways and means to cope with the situation were found. The processes for creating integrated action plans were mostly hybrid in one way or another, and while the social interaction of physical meetings was missed, the participants were by and large satisfied with the results. In fact, the participants appeared to have a more positive experience than those responsible for the processes – which of course is a good result, but also may highlight the extra effort and strain that the arrangers have felt. All in all, there are still challenges to meet, but the outlook is promising.

The full results will be available by the time we meet again in Fundao in June, and a playbook with checklists for online co-creation and development, based on data from this project and two others with similar themes, will be available in August.

Projects - Finished

Open Social Innovation policies driven by co-creative Regional Innovation…

The Osiris project is back with a new season of Open Social Innovation for regional development.

In the first season OSIRIS demonstrated how actors with different experiences and expectations can solve real-life societal challenges through OSI methods – stimulating a bottom-up co-creation process for regional development.

And here is a video to give you an overview of the results and long term impact of the first phase of the project.

Towards the end of season one, the pandemic hit and limited the important face to face interactions. This disrupted the collaboration process, but on the other hand, boosted smart working, and many distance-based collaborative tools for co-creation etc.

It did, however, leave us all with a feeling of uncertainty about the future and the role that OSI can play in regional development. But never questioning the need for engaging citizens – just finding new ways of doing it.

Europe is currently facing the challenges of the ecological transition and digital transformation. This means re-designing the human interaction with the physical environment for a more resilient society and sustainable way of living. In this post pandemic recovery, getting everyone onboard in a green and digital transition is at the forefront.

Building on prior results, the partners of Osiris will contribute to face these challenges by the following actions:

  1. conduct an evaluation of the OSI activities in the shadow of COVID-19, examining how OSI may be used towards an ecological and digital transition
  2. exchange experiences on the implementation of the recovery and resilience actions. A set of four interregional exchange events, including study visits will allow such a comprehensive review of experiences of handling the impact of the pandemic on OSI for regional innovation in diverse sectors: health, energy, culture, tourism and digital transformation of public administration.
  3. Through a series of webinars on the OSIRIS Youtube channel and interactions via social media, new learnings and good practices will be disseminated and communicated to a wide audience of policy makers, businesses, researchers and citizens.

Based on these additional activities, the partners will produce:

  • Six new good practices boosting ecological and digital transition
    Improvements of policy instruments
  • Six streamed events/webinars focused on the learnings of the exchanges of experience and helping to understand the impact of Covid on regional development and face the ecological and digital transition.

We welcome you all to this new season on all our channels.