SISCODE

About the project

The SISCODE project ran from 1 May 2018 to 30 April 2021.

SISCODE was a three-year project aiming to understand the co-creation phenomenon that is flourishing in Europe (in fab labs, living labs, social innovations, smart cities, communities and regions) and to analyse the context and conditions that support its effective introduction, scalability and replication. This helped bridge the gap between the process of co-constructing policies and their implementation. Co-creation was analysed in particular in the light of Responsible Research and Innovation and Science, technology and innovation policies. 

Scope

The SISCODE project focused on the co-creation process and its role in the implementation of Public Engagement (PE) and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). The policy objectives of the project demanded the early involvement of multiple actors, including the public, in science and innovation. Yet, public involvement rarely went beyond the stage of consultation. In this context, the emergence of co-creation across Europe was a phenomenon that warranted attention, as it maintained a symbiotic relationship with Social Innovation (SI). The bottom-up nature and social qualities of co-creation had the potential to foster the co-production of solutions by a multitude of stakeholders, through the interplay of state, industry and civil sector actors.

Co-creation ecosystems were identified as necessary for the development of Social Innovation and its contribution to PE and RRI. However, several barriers hindering such developments were identified during the formulation of the SISCODE project:

• the lack of awareness and understanding of the potential of co-creation among researchers, innovators, intermediaries and policymakers;

• the “sectorialised” approach to STI policymaking, which hampered collaboration among sectors, functions and divisions within and across organisations;

• the lack of competences and methodologies to bridge the gap between the co-construction of solutions and policies and their actual implementation;

• the absence of a learning framework to support the replication of virtuous mechanisms of co-creation, including knowledge on how to cope with constraints and barriers that frequently arose during the process.

The SISCODE project aimed to better understand co-creation as a bottom-up and design-driven phenomenon, and tasked itself with three main objectives:

• To create and run a European-wide study of existing co-creation ecosystems and to describe effective dynamics and outcomes for the implementable integration of society in science and innovation;
• To experiment with design as a new system of competences on which to build capacity for implementable co-creation in RRI and STI policy making;
• To understand the cultural, organisational and procedural transformations needed to embed co-creation as a design-driven approach in RRI processes and STI policy making.

Finally, in order to attain these objectives the SISCODE project did:

• analyse and compare 40 cases of co-creation ecosystems across Europe
• detect the barriers that reside in diverse cultural, societal and regulatory contexts
• develop a learning framework for co-creation based on the iterative design cycle
• build a transnational system of co-creation laboratories
• set up an intermediate playground for policy makers
• co-produce situated models of co-creation ecosystems

SISCODE received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement no. 788217