What does co-creation mean? An attempt at definition informed by the perspectives of school health promoters in France

Abstract

Background: Capacity building and community-level participation are important to enhance the efficiency and sustainability of health promotion programmes, as well as to promote empowerment and decision-making power. However, stakeholders’ participation in the design and implementation of health promotion projects often involves the provision of information and consultation rather than partnership or citizen control, especially in school settings. Co-creation could be a means to support higher levels of participation, yet its definition remains unclear. A further challenge relates to the methods needed to promote participation. Examining what co-creation represents for health promoters could help in both of these respects. Objectives and goals: This study explored how school health promotion professionals perceived and defined co-creation to gain insight into how to encourage co-creation processes in school-based health promotion. Methods: Qualitative data including documents and illustrations were collected during creative thinking activities undertaken with school health promotion professionals. All data collected were transcribed and analysed using a three-stage screening process. Results: Co-creation is a multi-dimensional construct. Based on our findings, it is a voluntary-based process of bottom-up collaboration informed by values of diversity, mutual trust, openness, autonomy, freedom, respect and shared expertise, responsibility and decision-making. Co-creation can result in out-of-the-box, new or improved tailored health-promoting practices and projects, which address a co-defined need, for the benefit of all members of the group. Conclusion: Co-creation is timely and key in school health promotion practices. Further research is needed into the specific competences needed to promote co-creation, as well as the methods used to evaluate achievements and added value of co-creation at different levels of implementation.

Success of and Barriers to Workshop Methodology: Experiences from Exploration and Pedagogical Innovation Laboratories (EX-PED-LAB)

“…The concept of co-creation has a diverse heritage from psychotherapy, management science, innovation and open innovation, design, literary theory, and creativity practice (Ind & Coates, 2013). We can also find recent relevant explorative studies with the public health domain, where co-creation is a multi-dimensional construct starting out from the very start of a research design (Darlington & Masson, 2021, Daly-Smith, et al, 2020. Based on the findings of Darlington and Masson (2021), co-creation is a voluntary-based process of bottom-up collaboration informed by values of diversity, mutual trust, openness, autonomy, freedom, respect and shared expertise, responsibility, and decision-making.…”

“…We can also find recent relevant explorative studies with the public health domain, where co-creation is a multi-dimensional construct starting out from the very start of a research design (Darlington & Masson, 2021, Daly-Smith, et al, 2020. Based on the findings of Darlington and Masson (2021), co-creation is a voluntary-based process of bottom-up collaboration informed by values of diversity, mutual trust, openness, autonomy, freedom, respect and shared expertise, responsibility, and decision-making. This research highlights that co-creation can result in out-of-the-box, new or improved tailored healthpromoting practices and projects, which address a co-defined need, for the benefit of all members of the group.…”

Co-creation solutions and the three Co’s framework for applying Co-creation

“…, 2016) with the EU commission embracing the need for participatory approaches as a more sustainable model because current societal demands are too complex to be met by the public sector alone [1] (Torfing et al ., 2019). However, this has been used inconsistently across and within countries with a variety of terminology, such as co-design, co-production and co-creation, with a range of delivery from tokenistic consultation to partnership and collaboration (Darlington et al. , 2022; Martin, 2010).…”

Co-creation of a complex, multicomponent rehabilitation intervention and feasibility trial protocol for the PostUraL tachycardia Syndrome Exercise (PULSE) study

“…Co-production has largely been applied in qualitative research, but there is a strong rationale for this methodology to inform the design and implementation of interventions for testing in feasibility RCTs [ 18 ]. However, co-production is considered to be focused more on the implementation stage [ 19 ] and a component within the overarching concept of co-creation [ 20 , 21 ]. Co-creation as an approach facilitates innovation with a wider range of stakeholders earlier in the development continuum, with the initiation of research ideas and iterative design [ 22 , 23 ].…”