Achieving Social Innovation with Citizen Co-Creation : A Minor Field Study with a public entity in Medellin, Colombia

Sammanfattning: The world is facing severe and complex issues and the sustainable development challenges are immense. In order to meet the challenges, social innovation is crucially needed. Developing social innovation is however challenging and collaboration among stakeholders is an important factor to overcome this. A way to collaborate with citizens is with citizen co-creation. The aim of this study was to investigate how citizen co-creation is used as a mean to achieve social innovation. This was done by investigating the research questions “Which factors have a positive impact on the citizen co-creation process to achieve social innovation?“ and “What are the challenges of using citizen co-creation to achieve social innovation and what are the potential solutions?”. Literature within social innovation and citizen co-creation was reviewed and a case study was performed. The case study was executed in Medellin, Colombia, together with a public entity working with the transformation of the city. A program for a citizen co-creation process called MiMedellin was studied. Interviews were performed with team members working with the program and stakeholders involved in a specific project. Secondary data regarding type of challenges and the citizens behaviour on the platform was also analysed in order to confirm information collected in the interviews. This master’s thesis revealed a strong link between citizen co-creation and social innovation. The ways to work in citizen co-creation align with key factors in the social innovation process and citizen co-creation is therefore a mean to achieve social innovation. Factors with a positive impact in the citizen co-creation process were found to be related to ways to work, methods for citizen participation and leadership. Challenges of achieving social innovation with citizen co-creation were found to be related to trust, engagement and the complexity of the process. This master’s thesis suggests ways to overcome the challenges as well as gives practical and theoretical implications and areas for future research.