CO-CREATION
WHY?
TOPIC 1
Co-creation as leverage for higher education
Generally speaking, higher education establishments can use co-creation as leverage for pursuing future-oriented routines. Co-creation enables institutions to teach their students VUCA competencies and even co-creation skills. Co-creation enables teachers to reflect on their subject matter and can support the nexus between research and education. Furthermore, pooling strengths can generate rationalisation benefits (infrastructure, expertise, staff…), with the ultimate goal of optimising the range of basic programmes and permanent education for students, course participants, and employees (within the framework of lifelong learning).
VUCA stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous: four features of the rapidly changing world.
Why teach students to co-create?
Educators traditionally state that they are preparing students for a successful start in the labour market. When asked further questions, they usually recite a number of competencies, if not an exhaustive official list of professional behaviours that a professional must be capable of.
This logic meets with the fundamental and growing criticism that good professionals are capable of more than displaying all of today’s standard behaviours or transferring such behaviours to slightly different contexts. They must also be capable of developing new behaviours that successfully address the challenges of tomorrow. In other words, good professionals are solution-oriented and able to collaborate with others on complex issues. After all, due to the rapid evolutions in the professional field and in society (VUCA world ), our graduates will be increasingly faced with such issues.
Such challenges are not only difficult to predict for educators, they will also differ from one graduate to the next. This means that a capacity for learning and a capacity for adaptation will be among the key characteristics of tomorrow’s professional. The development of such capacities cannot be taken for granted; they are not acquired spontaneously. On the contrary: their development must be fostered in a targeted manner.
Why co-create as a higher education institution or as a programme?
We, as a higher education institution, find ourselves in a similar position: the complex issues of a VUCA world can only be resolved in collaboration with relevant partners. We are no longer able to monitor all the knowledge and all its applications in terms of both breadth and depth; we will need partners to convey such expertise to students, in concert with our staff. If we want to afford our students opportunities to learn to co-create, we ourselves will need to set a good example in this respect, by being alert to the needs of partners generating opportunities for co-creation and by ourselves venturing steps in a co-creative process of exploration, all this at the institutional micro, meso, and macro levels. Furthermore, co-creation can help us to better gear our range of programmes to the demand (for example, our lifelong learning programmes), to attract and graduate a wider range of learners, and to make an actual difference in practice through our research and the societal services that we provide (sustainable innovation).