The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. Co-Creation for Sustainability brings global SDGs to the local level, explaining local co-creation practices, the creation of collaborative platforms, and the empowerment of stakeholders to have a positive collective impact.

Apple embraced co-creation to enhance the speed and scope of its innovation, generat­ing over $1 billion for its App-Store partner-developers in two years, even as it overtook Microsoft in market value. Starbucks launched its online platform MyStarbucksIdea.com to tap into ideas from customers and turbocharged a turnaround. Unilever turned to co-creation for redesigning prod­uct lines such as Sunsilk shampoo and revitalized growth. Nike achieved remarkable success with its Nike+ co-creation initiative, which enables a com­munity of over a million runners to interact with one another and the company, increasing its market share by 10 percent in the first year. Co-creation involves redefining the way organizations engage individuals—customers, employees, suppliers, partners, and other stake­holders—bringing them into the process of value creation and engaging them in enriched experi­ences, in order to —formulate new breakthrough strategies —design compelling new products and services —transform management processes —lower risks and costs —increase market share, loyalty, and returns In this pathbreaking book, Venkat Ramaswamy (who coined the term co-creation with C. K. Prahalad) and Francis Gouillart, pioneers in working with com­panies to develop co-creation practices, show how every organization—from large corporation to small firm, and government agency to not-for-profit—can achieve “win more–win more” results with these methods. Based on extraordinary research and the authors’ hands-on experiences with successful projects in co-creation at dozens of the world’s most exciting organizations, The Power of Co-Creation illustrates with detailed examples from leading firms such as those above, as well as from Cisco, GlaxoSmithKline, Ama­zon, Jabil, Predica, Wacoal, Caja Navarra, and many others, how enterprises have used a wide range of “engagement platforms”—and how they have even restructured internal management processes—in order to harness the power of co-creation. As the authors’ wealth of examples make vividly clear, enterprises can no longer afford to view custom­ers and other stakeholders as passive recipients of their products and services but must learn to engage them in defining and delivering enhanced value. Co-creation goes beyond the conventional “process view” of qual­ity, re-engineering, and lean thinking, and is the essential new mind-set and practice for boosting sus­tainable growth, productivity, and profits in the future.

Rural tourism is not a new phenomenon in many parts of the world, but it has only recently received increased attention from researchers, politicians and managers as a result of new market trends, the recognition of the “rural crisis” and the urge to solve it. However, there is also evidence that rural tourism is not a miraculous antidote for this crisis, certainly not in all places and under all conditions. Despite some recent studies examining the critical factors of success for rural tourism, there is still a need for a deeper understanding of the rural tourism phenomenon, the nature of the tourism experience and how it could be optimized to the benefit of all, while making the best use of endogenous resources and competences, yielding sustainable destination development. This book contributes to the debate, focusing on the tourist experience, here conceptualized as “co-created” between hosts and guests, based on destination-specific elements of “countryside capital” and aiming at sustainability. It contains both conceptual and empirical chapters, with diverse and new perspectives, methodological approaches and cases from several countries.

This open access book explores creative and collaborative forms of research praxis within the social sustainability sciences. The term co-creativity is used in reference to both individual methods and overarching research approaches. Supported by a series of in-depth examples, the edited collection critically reviews the potential of co-creative research praxis to nurture just and transformative processes of change. Included amongst the individual chapters are first-hand accounts of such as: militant research strategies and guerrilla narrative, decolonial participative approaches, appreciative inquiry and care-ethics, deep-mapping, photo-voice, community-arts, digital participatory mapping, creative workshops and living labs. The collection considers how, through socially inclusive forms of action and reflection, such co-creative methods can be used to stimulate alternative understandings of why and how things are, and how they could be. It provides illustrations of (and problematizes) the use of co-creative methods as overtly disruptive interventions in their own right, and as a means of enriching the transformative potential of transdisciplinary and more traditional forms of social science research inquiry. The positionality of the researcher, together with the emotional and embodied dimensions of engaged scholarship, are threads which run throughout the book. So too does the question of how to communicate sustainability science research in a meaningful way.

Sustainability has become an unavoidable topic in modern society. In order for sustainable development to be fully achieved, it must be integrated into the planning and measurement systems of business enterprises. Green Initiatives for Business Sustainability and Value Creation is an essential reference source including the most recent scholarly research on the development and application of green business models for contemporary organizations, with a focus on possible contexts and constructs of closed loop supply chain management. Featuring extensive coverage on topics such as consumption behavior, political economy, and structural modeling, this book is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, and professionals seeking current research on the importance of strategic green business practices.

Experiences are an important part of our lives and increasingly represent a crucial topic to address for businesses and professionals. This book focuses on designing, staging and managing experiences within the context of the events, tourism and hospitality industries. It also illustrates current and future developments in these industries and wider society, with an emphasis on sustainable development. The book offers an innovative approach for successfully creating experiences for (potential) customers that is based on combining insights and methods from the world of design and the social sciences. Moreover, it shows how the experience economy and sustainable development both reinforce one another and create challenges that businesses and professionals can address through this approach. Critical thinking questions, practical examples and international case studies are integrated throughout the text. Combining a design science and a social sciences perspective in one inclusive hands-on approach to designing, staging and managing experiences, this is essential reading for all students of Events, Tourism and Hospitality Management, but also related fields.

We need new governance solutions to help us improve public policies and services, solve complex societal problems, strengthen social communities and reinvigorate democracy. By changing how government engages with citizens and stakeholders, co-creation provides an attractive and feasible approach to governance that goes beyond the triptych of public bureaucracy, private markets and self-organized communities. Inspired by the successful use of co-creation for product and service design, this book outlines a broad vision of co-creation as a strategy of public governance. Through the construction of platforms and arenas to facilitate co-creation, this strategy can empower local communities, enhance broad-based participation, mobilize societal resources and spur public innovation while building ownership for bold solutions to pressing problems and challenges. The book details how to use co-creation to achieve goals. This exciting and innovative study combines theoretical argument with illustrative empirical examples, visionary thinking and practical recommendations.

A guide to collaborative impact for leaders in industry, government, and social change networks Our world is facing unsustainable global trends—from climate change and water scarcity to energy insecurity, unfair labor practices, and growing inequality. Tackling these crises effectively requires a new form of leadership—a collective one. But, in a world of many silos, how do we get people to work together toward a common goal? That is one of the most important questions facing sustainability and social-change professionals around the world, and it is a question that Petra Kuenkel answers in The Art of Leading Collectively. Readers learn how to tackle system change for sustainable development, reimagine leadership as a collaborative endeavor, retrain leaders to work collectively, and manage diverse groups through a change process that has sustainability as a guiding focus. Drawing upon two decades of pioneering, internationally recognized work orchestrating multi-stakeholder initiatives, Kuenkel presents her chief tool, the Collective Leadership Compass, and shows others how to use it with large groups of diverse stakeholders to solve complex, urgent problems—particularly those that enmesh business activities, governance, human needs, and environmental impacts. The book offers many examples of collective leadership efforts involving corporate, public, and nonprofit sectors around the world. Readers learn about the processes that led to a sustainable textile alliance and set standards for sustainable cocoa and coffee production and trade, as well as those that helped nations rebound from war, develop sustainable infrastructure, and tackle resource conflicts with global businesses, to name a few. Kuenkel provides a clear roadmap for leaders from multinational companies involved in partnerships, international organizations engaged in cooperative development, public agencies, and interest groups—as well as for citizens seeking solutions to social and sustainability challenge

This open access book attends to the co-creation of digital public services for ageing societies. Increasingly public services are provided in digital form; their uptake however remains well below expectations. In particular, amongst older adults the need for public services is high, while at the same time the uptake of digital services is lower than the population average. One of the reasons is that many digital public services (or e-services) do not respond well to the life worlds, use contexts and use practices of its target audiences. This book argues that when older adults are involved in the process of identifying, conceptualising, and designing digital public services, these services become more relevant and meaningful. The book describes and compares three co-creation projects that were conducted in two European cities, Bremen and Zaragoza, as part of a larger EU-funded innovation project. The first part of the book traces the origins of co-creation to three distinct domains, in which co-creation has become an equally important approach with different understandings of what it is and entails: (1) the co-production of public services, (2) the co-design of information systems and (3) the civic use of open data. The second part of the book analyses how decisions about a co-creation project’s governance structure, its scope of action, its choice of methods, its alignment with strategic policies and its embedding in existing public information infrastructures impact on the process and its results. The final part of the book identifies key challenges to co-creation and provides a more general assessment of what co-creation may achieve, where the most promising areas of application may be and where it probably does not match with the contingent requirements of digital public services. Contributing to current discourses on digital citizenship in ageing societies and user-centric design, this book is useful for researchers and practitioners interested in co-creation, public sector innovation, open government, ageing and digital technologies, citizen engagement and civic participation in socio-technical innovation.

The world’s population is currently undergoing a significant transition towards urbanisation, with the UN expecting that 70% of people globally will live in cities by 2050. Urbanisation has multiple political, cultural, environmental and economic dimensions that profoundly influence social development and innovation. This fundamental long-term transformation will involve the realignment of urban society’s technologies and infrastructures, culture and lifestyles, as well as governance and institutional frameworks. Such structural systemic realignments can be referred to as urban sustainability transitions: fundamental and structural changes in urban systems through which persistent societal challenges are addressed, such as shifts towards urban farming, renewable decentralised energy systems, and social economies. This book provides new insights into how sustainability transitions unfold in different types of cities across the world and explores possible strategies for governing urban transitions, emphasising the co-evolution of material and institutional transformations in socio-technical and socio-ecological systems. With case studies of mega-cities such as Seoul, Tokyo, New York and Adelaide, medium-sized cities such as Copenhagen, Cape Town and Portland, and nonmetropolitan cities such as Freiburg, Ghent and Brighton, the book provides an opportunity to reflect upon the comparability and transferability of theoretical/conceptual constructs and governance approaches across geographical contexts. Urban Sustainability Transitions is key reading for students and scholars working in Environmental Sciences, Geography, Urban Studies, Urban Policy and Planning.