Unboxing co-creation with students

Potentials and tensions for academic libraries

Abstract

Co-creation has received increasing interest as a way of develop products and services in collaboration with customers and clients. Recently, co-creation has been introduced in higher education; however, there is no general agreement about what this entails, and while the concept of co-creation has been used in a number of differing contexts, descriptions tend to focus on potentials only and not the tensions inherent in this kind of collaboration.

In this paper we describe a conceptual model for co-creation with students and explore the potentials as well as the tensions inherent in co-creation with students at academic libraries. Through a case study at The Royal Danish Library, Aarhus University Library we develop a conceptual model for co-creation with students that identifies the key aspects of co-creation with students and indicates its key potentials and tensions.