How to facilitate creativity on mass-scale?
In the context of project U_CODE we investigated both offline and online approaches for facilitating creativity on mass-scale. All offline approaches we found were either inefficient one-way communication and referenda (f.i. the case of Hamburg Olympics) or classical facilitation of sessions with subgroups. The latter is not efficient for massive scale since it was found 1 Facilitator can only handle a maximum of 10 Participants. Some recent attempts to massive scale Co-design like Living Labs [Criollo, 2016] show the same type of failure to meet the criteria of mass participation being both effective in the two-way communication and efficient in the Facilitator/Participants ratio.
Most online approaches reach a large audience, but struggle in being effective in the two-way communication. Pure Co-Creation on a massive scale, i.e. close collaboration in a mutual value creation process, has not (yet) been identified online. More recent approaches are experimenting with hybrid methods by mixing online and offline tools (f.i. companies like Zebralog[1] and Stormz[2]. For developing online approaches collaboration practices which suit the digital era should be acknowledged (Callabretta and Kleinsmann, 2017).
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 688873.