Co-creation of Public Service Innovation - Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Tech

This paper draws together ideas about co-creation, social innovation, social investment and individual and collective values that underpins the CoSIE project and shows the relationship between these concepts and how they can support innovation in public services. In co-creation, people who use services work with professionals to design, create and deliver services (SCIE 2015). Involvement of users in the planning process as well as in service delivery is what distinguishes co-creation from closely related concepts such as co-production (Osborne and Strokosch 2013). However, this distinction goes deeper than simply specifying the point at which people get involved in the co-design of services. Osborne (2018) argues that co-production assumes a process in which the public service organisation is still dominant and logic is linear. By contrast co-creation assumes “an interactive and dynamic relationship where value is created at the nexus of interaction” (Osborne 2018: 225). In the final part of this paper we present a unified approach to co-creation that covers key concepts in the project: innovation in public service, co-creation and the role of individual and collective values. We start by discounting the idea that co-creation is simply synomous with greater choice. Instead we argue that by placing value creation at the heart of our understanding of co-creation we must also recognise the importance of reciprocal, trusting relationships, situated in supportive communities, leading to new understandings of the role of the State and democratic renewal. This leads us to consider the moral dimensions of ‘value’ in the context of co-creation. Accepting that co-creation is necessarily a moral enterprise raises issues for the development of a methodology for the operationalisation of the co-creation framework on a general level. In conclusion, the CoSIE project applies a service-dominant logic view of service innovation which highlights that value is fundamentally derived and determined in a particular context and that relationships between services, citizens and the communities that they are situated in are central to the creation of value.