Co-creation as a driver of social innovation and public service reform?

Co-creation has come to the forefront of policy as an innovative way of planning, managing, delivering and assessing public services, especially in the fields of social care, health, education and housing. Although far from universally applied, it has powerful support and many committed champions. Co-creation implies but goes beyond making public services more responsive to the needs and wishes of individuals and communities. It means that people often thought of as ‘users’, ‘targets’ or ‘beneficiaries’ have knowledge and experience that is of value for shaping service innovations. As the Co-creation of Service Innovation in Europe (CoSIE) pilots progressed, engaged with diverse stakeholders and began to share their learning, it became more prominent and explicit across the project that co-creation can only be said to take place when people no longer have services ‘done to’ them. The mantra of disability activism, ‘nothing about us without us’, gained traction in the consortium. Following the conceptual exposition of co-creation in Chapter 2, this chapter highlights its advance in public policy and emphasises the association of co-creation with social innovation. Innovation means new ideas that are put into practice (Hartley, 2014). Social innovation is specifically about human needs (Brandsen et al, 2016; Marques et al, 2017).