Living Labs for innovating relationships: the CoSMoS tool

Living Labs have emerged across Europe to foster experimentation and testing of new solutions in public administration. There are many variations, but core features include real-life settings and cooperation between multiple stakeholders in an overarching innovation agenda. The Living Lab in the CoSIE project represents an approach to innovating relationships between stakeholders in multi-agency, cross-sector collaboration contexts. It does this through the representation of projects and programmes using a range of visualisation and modelling techniques supported by a suite of open source and creative commons tools. The CoSIE project applied Living Labs to support pilots with meeting their goals of service innovation and co-creation through the innovation of relationships.

In this chapter we present an initial generic co-creation model followed by a series of analytic models, each of which links to practical challenges associated with co-creation. Then we illustrate how the models were adopted in practice in two CoSIE pilot sites, in Greece and Hungary, both a representation of models created within the project to support distributed synchronous and asynchronous co-creation. We conclude with reflections on how the CoSMoS tool supports practitioners/participants in realising and communicating co-creation within their environments as part of reflective and evaluative engagements.