The impact of co-creation in design thinking for social innovation : the case of OpenIdeo

Abstract

Innovation as a tool for creating value for companies stands as the first goal for managers in this competitive world we live today. Design Thinking (DT) has brought the attention of both academics and practitioners as a powerful methodology to connect with human needs and behaviour. The growing awareness of confronting and answering to social world problems has also positioned DT as influential instrument to grow and allowing social innovation (SI) to emerge. Co-creation (CC) transformed the social system that organizations and consumers interacted. Today, institutions promote experiences that better suits the needs of the individuals, with the goal of producing better products and services. Co-design (CD) refers to the methodology of applying co-creation techniques to the DT. It adds value to this innovation process as it enforces the idea of experience between the users/producers. Relevant to this phenomenon, is Internet. It has shaped the large community of users as individuals worried with the difficulties world faces nowadays. This community creates new meanings everyday and introduced the notion that we as humans can design artefacts collectively. This research investigates the committed role of a specific online platform to form a community to solve world challenges, by the implementation of a design thinking methodology. The mission of this dissertation is to understand what occurs when a group of individuals co-create for social innovation, and what can we learn from this interaction.