The CoSIE project states that public sector innovations can be achieved by creating collaborative partnerships between service providers and service beneficiaries. The project contributes to democratic dimensions and social inclusion through co-creating public services by engaging diverse citizen groups and stakeholders. Utilizing blended data sources (open data, social media) with the innovative deployment of ICT (data-analytics, Living Lab, Community reporting) the project introduces the culture of experiments that encompasses various stakeholders for co-creating service innovations.

The CoSIE partners will actively search for new ways to use digital tools and open data as an enabler of the co-creation in public services. The project has two overarching aims:

1. to advance the active shaping of service priorities by end users and their informal support networks
2. to engage citizens, especially groups often called ‘hard to reach’, in the collaborative design of public services.

The aims are divided into six objectives:

1. to develop practical resources grounded in asset based knowledge to support new ways for public service actors to re-define operational processes
2. to produce and deliver nine real-life pilots to co-create a set of relational public services with various combinations of public sector, civil society and commercial actors
3. to draw together cross-cutting lessons from pilots and utilize innovative visualization methods in order to share and validate new ideas and models of good governance
4. to apply innovative approaches appropriate to local contexts and user groups to gather the necessary user insight to co-create services
5. to ensure sustainability by establishing local trainers for animating dialogue and collating users’ voices, embedded in community networks
6. to mobilize new knowledge from piloting and validating by creating an accessible, user friendly roadmap to co-creation for service providers and their partners.

The project will be implemented as a joint venture of 24 partners from 10 EU countries. During the implementation of CoSIE, the collaborative partners will test and develop the diverse methods of co-creation in the field of public services. The co-creation process in this particular project consists of nine individual pilots. Each pilot has different target groups, service needs and local settings. With innovative and new approaches and practices, the CoSIE project aims to improve the inclusion of all citizens and to promote their possibilities to act as active members of the society.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 770492. The content of the web site reflects the authors’ views and the Managing Agency cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.