When the city council of Sunderland, UK engaged with LiveWork, a service design company, to find new approaches to helping economically inactive people into work, it also engaged in an entirely different development process. Over the course of the project, the designers spent three months following 12 people to gain a deep insight into their lives, and more than 280 people were involved in idea-development sessions. Building on design approaches such as ethnographic research, service journeys, fast experimentation and prototyping, LiveWork helped the city council to identify a range of possible solutions that could get people more efficiently on a path back to work. The key solution became a platform that built on the resources within the existing local network of community organisations in fields such as mental health, drug rehabilitation and caring. LiveWork found that these community groups already had relationships with citizens in need – relationships that could be leveraged at not just the beginning but at every stage of citizens’ paths back to work. The organisations could function as an ‘activity coalition’, serving as mentors, providing resources and helping citizens along each step of their journey back into work, in collaboration with established Jobcentre Plus employment services (Livework, 2006; Gillinson et al, 2010).

The application of design thinking – the intellectual and practical foundation of the co-creation process – is expanding rapidly in the public sector. From the design of open learning environments in French schools to transforming staff–patient interaction and designing bugs out of UK hospitals to reshaping services to injured Danish workers, design thinking is a core driver of innovation in government. Scholars and practitioners alike have claimed that design is the ‘midwife of innovation’ (Design Council, 2009a; iLipinar et al, 2009; Bason, 2014; Staszowski and Brown, 2016; Bason, 2017).

This chapter introduces the co-creation section of this book, which consists of four interrelated themes: design thinking, citizen involvement, the co-creation process and learning through measuremen