Public Innovation Through Co-creation Platforms in Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The participation of citizens to solve public challenges is a driver to implement public innovation. Addressing new mechanisms and arenas that facilitate citizen participation is one of the challenges on the governments’ agenda, especially under changing, complex and social distancing scenarios such as those caused by the Covid-19 Pandemic. Therefore, digital platforms that promote co-creation between citizens, governments, and other actors in the countries’ innovation ecosystems, are becoming more and more necessary, but at the same time, there is a need to study their scope and contributions to generate transparent, equitable, inclusive and people-centered citizen participation processes. Indeed, the research aim was to make a trend analysis on the field integrating two methods: a literature review about concepts related to public innovation platforms: co-creation and citizen participation; and finally, a web content analysis on three platforms that generated co-creation exercises to solve challenges in the Covid-19 Pandemic. The main results show the need to study the challenges and contributions of digital platforms to make public innovation the result of a collaborative effort that goes beyond the ideation stages to implement solutions and generate public value.