London is one of the biggest cities in the world; it is a massive player in the worlds finance, fashion, business, party, retail and social media industries. It’s a place where dreams can be made and literally anything can happen! But even though London has an unlistable amount of good points and amazing opportunities, it’s not perfect.
Co-Create London is a new website aiming to address London’s main issues and annoyances by listening to the people who know the city best – the general public.
Whether you have lived in London for your whole life or just passed through Co-Create London would like you to answer a very simple question ‘What Would You Do To Make London a Better Place?’ By gathering ideas, solutions and fresh thinking about the city the site hopes to address issues that are important to people of London and give citizens the platform to make positive changes.
Over the next few weeks the site will be collecting ideas and encouraging users to vote on their favourites. The ideas that receive the most votes will be taken forward into a co-creation workshop. The workshop will see Londoners who contributed to the cocreatelondon.com website come together with London experts to turn the ideas into positive and real solutions.
These solutions will then be marched to Town Hall and presented in front of London Mayor Boris Johnson. The hope is that Bojo will listen to Co-Create London and the ideas taken from the website will become a reality, making London a better place to visit and live.
To let Boris know exactly what you would do to make London a better place – or just read & vote on some great ideas, head over to www.cocreatelondon.com
The newly formed Co-Creation Hub needed a logo and for a collective that prides itself in ‘doing things with people rather than at them’ we would obviously need to Co-Create this logo. We needed to walk the walk.
So first we got in touch with Headbox, the Hub’s online community of 16-24 year olds and set a 5,000 strong crowd the task of designing us a logo based around a brief of ‘doing things with people not at people’. Their incentive was a cash prize.
We got back some amazing results as well as some awful ones too. This is what makes crowd sourcing exciting but also on its own, limiting. Which is why the Hub’s philosophy is never to rely solely on the crowd; it is a means to an end rather than an end in itself.
- In a world where Brands must adapt or die, a new collective comes together introducing their first co-creation project -
24nd February, 2010: Today sees the launch of The Co-Creation Hub, www.co-creationhub.com. A collective of organisations, academics and individuals who passionately believe in doing things ‘with’ people rather than ‘at’ people. Their first project is Co-Create London, an independent initiative giving the general public’s most pressing issues, and their solutions, a platform to be heard.
The founding members of The Co-Creation Hub – London are Face, the co-creation planning agency, which has successfully co-created projects for international companies such as Coca-Cola, Nokia, Unilever, and Reckitt Benckiser; Farm, the advertising agency, which has co-created communications for Nestle’s Skinny Cow; Opticomm, the media planning agency; Touch of Mojo, the brand design agency; and thrudigital, the social media development agency. And, they are actively looking for organisations and individuals from different fields that share their way of thinking, to get involved and help develop the co-creation movement.
The Co-Creation Hub – London is the first of a planned number of Hubs across the world, as the principle of co-creativity grows and develops in territories such as Latin America, Asia and the USA.
This story begins in 2004, a year when 120 million Americans voted George Bush Jnr into government for a second term, The Lord of The Rings: Return of the King won 11 Oscars, Ireland introduced the smoking ban and a small start-up called Face started to get going. read more
The Co-creation Hub is a collective of organisations, academics and individuals who believe in doing things ‘with’ people rather than ‘at’ people.
We currently work in the branding and communications industry, but we think our approach can be applied to any number of industries and organisations in order to solve almost any problem.
We believe great ideas can come from anywhere and anyone. And that means there is a huge untapped resource of creativity out there that co-creation can allow to flourish.
We have already co-created new products for Unilever, advertising campaigns for Nestle and communications strategies for Carphone Warehouse and seen startling results.
Consumers now control brands. They play with them, re-shape them and even imbue them with new meaning. And the successful brands and businesses of the future will put co-creation at the heart of everything they do and treat people as active equals rather than passive respondents.
At its core, the Co-creation Hub is about collaboration. We believe in involving people at every stage of everything we do. We find out what people think, what they like to talk about, what products they actually want to buy and how they would like to be spoken to. And then we co-create our work with them rather than ‘target’ them. That way, the work we produce engages more people, resonates more deeply and actively encourages people to play with our ideas.
Whether manufacturers, artists, writers, designers or government organisations, The Co-Creation Hub – London is looking to collaborate with people from around the world involved in co-creation, whatever their discipline, to stimulate the co-creation approach.
Following on from the success of our Web 2.0 Women forum earlier this year we thought it was about time we opened up another hot topic for debate. The last Face Forum revolved around the key question ‘Do Brands Need Agencies?’ On the 18th of November we have been joined by friends, experts and clients at the Groucho club to discuss what it takes to stay relevant and true to your consumers, how to engage the crowds in research innovation and planning and what are some of the tech trends for 2010 and beyond. Here’s a quick summary:
Apologies for the title, we couldn’t find a better one! This deck has been recently presented at MRS New Media and Research Technologies conference and AURA conference.
It’s all about Real-time intelligence, collaborative research and adaptive brand planning, which we think are the three elements that make Research 3.0 different.
Slides up from last Friday’s Open Hardware conference at Nesta Hq. It was a really interesting day, engaging conversations and some (telling) arguments! All in all, It was very useful for me to reflect on the differences between the co-creation and crowdsourcing models on one side and the opensource model/community on the other side.
