Beyond participation: exploring stakeholder empowerment in the co-creation of innovation through living labs

The aim of my research is to study how co-creation, and its various forms such as living labs, public procurement of innovation, and co-creation facilities, is practiced across different socio-cultural, institutional, and technical settings. With these insights, the broader aim is to contribute to developing two theoretical frameworks: “situated co-creation” and “socially robust scaling”. Situated co-creation is a framework that accounts for differences in socio-political context in the design and performance of co-creation instruments. It draws on insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) that argue that analytic perspectives and processes of innovation are always culturally “situated” (Haraway, 1988; Jasanoff, 2005). Socially robust scaling is a framework for operationalizing these insights to allow for wider dissemination and uptake of co-creation and to articulate them in a policy roadmap. This framework also is based on the STS concept of “Mode 2” and “socially robust knowledge” that replaces the idea of scientific validity as being limited to research in the laboratory ((Nowotny, 2003).