What about the collaborators?
We’re all spending a lot of time talking about businesses and how they can employ co-creation to innovate in new and exciting ways. It’s certainly important to discuss this topic from the business side of things, but what about the outsiders these companies recruit to co-create with? What’s their experience of the process and how do they benefit?
We do a lot of co-creation work at Sense Worldwide with clued-in consumers, articulate creatives and generally cool, interesting people. We’re very lucky in that we’ve put in the time to build up a network of 1800 people who are particularly suited to co-creative working practices so we can draw on them for all sorts of projects. We keep them engaged through a range of community building initiatives like art fairs, monthly film nights and a variety of other events; we also incentivise them for every project they do with us.
Before I worked at Sense I was one of these people and I worked with Sense as a collaborator on a number of co-creation projects. I found that I’d leave the sessions excited and fired up about all of the incredible ideas that had been produced. The sessions for me were an opportunity to use my brain in ways I didn’t get to use it in my day job – an open forum in which the seed of an idea could be put forward and then collectively developed into something much bigger and better than anything I could have come up with on my own. I felt part of something bigger and more important than myself and that was really satisfying – I suppose in a sort of ego-boosting way. The thought that my ideas might be important to a huge global company was thrilling. In short, I loved it and felt the benefits were massive.
I’d love to hear how others feel about being co-creation collaborators as I’m not sure I’m a representative sample!
I’ve taken part in two co-creation sessions with Sense and they were both pretty interesting. I definitely leave refreshed and inspired – first of all there’s the satisfaction of taking part and (hopefully!) coming up with a cool idea or two. There’s also a renewed hunger to apply the same kind of creative thinking to my own work – when you’ve come up with 20 possible ideas around a central concept in the space of an evening, it’s a reminder that really “oh I can’t think of any good ideas” is a cop-out in one’s own practice.
For kind of obvious reasons the session that was more about “what *could* be done in [x-space]” felt more productive and inspiring than the session about “what *should* be done in x-space” – there was a looser feel to the first one, people’s ideas weren’t in conflict with each other but instead there was more “yes-and” improvisational thought…. closer to the spirit of co-creation as opposed to a focus group that is merely more creative than usual.
Anyway, yes, one definitely gets something out of taking part, it’s excellent mental exercise at any rate!