In December 2010 Knowmads and Royal Haskoning SMC finished a co-creational project in sustainability. We did research in corporate social responsibility. We wanted to know what young professional in multinationals know about sustainability and what they do with it in private life and at work. Among all the results, we found out that sharing knowledge in sustainability between companies in different branches increases the level of innovation. (See http://www.knowmads.nl/?p=2621)

After having finished this research Royal Haskoning wanted to continue working with us. At Knowmads co-creation is one of our value. We believe in the power of diversity; that by bringing people together and by letting them share their knowledge, new knowledge can be created.  We also brought this back in the way we worked with Royal Haskoning and during our co-creational journey we discovered together the value of it.

Besides that we wanted to do something with the outcome of our former research: knowledge sharing between companies and branches. So we wanted to combine co-creation with knowledge sharing and that in the field of sustainability. Together we developed the follow-up project: The Co-creation Experience for a sustainable world; a cross-company event for our partner network.

The event took place in Utrecht last Thursday. We invited all the business partners of Knowmads and Royal Haskoning SMC, which were mainly international companies and governmental organizations. With the co-creation event we aimed to create things together, to share experience, expertise and insights in the field of sustainability.

We asked the participants to come with a question in sustainability. This was a question related to their business and where they need help or input from others. After having explained briefly the aim of that day, we started with playing the co-creation game that we developed.

We played this game in three rounds, so that each participant could ask one question. In each round eight participants could post their questions on sustainability to the others. After that the questions were post it was time to “run and experience”. At that moment all the other participants had to choose one question where they wanted to be involved with. Then they had twenty minutes the time to use the collective wisdom of the groups to create sustainable solutions for their case. After the discussions we invited the people to write down the created insights and connections on the Harvest and Connection wall.

Together with Maike, Renée and Liesbeth from Royal Haskoning SMC we organized the Co-creation Experience and working in this team setting was inspiring and also good fun! We would like to thank you for working together with us and making this project possible.

Looking back to Thursday we experienced this Co-creation Experience as very valuable: The atmosphere was good, we discussed all the questions, we had around fifty participants from large companies and institutes in the Netherlands (but also worldwide), we had great talks and not to forget, a lot of fun! Hereby we also thank everyone who was involved and made this event so successful!

We gained a lot of learnings and insight from organizing this event and we see opportunities to continue with organizing more Co-creation sessions or events in the future…  maybe in different formats, smaller or bigger projects, trying out different working methods. We keep you posted about the developments! And perhaps you see opportunities for Knowmads to create a co-creation project for your company. Do not hesitate to call us, visit us in school or have a coffee somewhere with us.

Warm regards,

Roy and Ditte

Here some more pictures of the day: