Co‐Design Methods That Foster Collaboration Among Highly Distant Actors: Insights From the Earth Observation Ecosystem

Abstract

To address the social and environmental challenges (also called ‘grand challenges’) faced by our society, new forms of collaborative and innovative processes are needed to support profound transformations of socioeconomic ecosystems. In such contexts, actors are likely to be highly distant from each other, not only geographically but also cognitively (having heterogeneous knowledge and expertise), organisationally (being scattered across different organisations and possibly sectors) and institutionally (not sharing the same rules and norms). This paper defines these types of contexts as situations of ‘grand distance’ where collaborative innovation is hindered by too large a degree of cognitive, organisational and institutional distance. This paper thus aims to shed light on a specific class of co‐design methods, called ‘resilient‐fit co‐design methods’, which help manage the distance between highly heterogeneous actors to foster collaborative innovation. An example of grand‐distance situations can be seen in the field of Earth observation (EO), where data‐based solution designers undertake dedicated co‐design efforts to integrate data into multiple ecosystems with the specific aim of addressing contemporary socioenvironmental challenges. Based on an in‐depth empirical investigation of two case studies in this field, this paper describes how resilient‐fit co‐design methods can be built in such contexts, revealing their similarities and specificities with respect to existing co‐design methods. This paper also highlights several original forms of ecosystem dynamics, which are driven by external actors and oriented towards locally enhancing the resilience of ecosystems. As such, this research offers theoretical and practical contributions that enrich the pool of available co‐design methods necessary for the transformation of socioeconomic ecosystems to address grand challenges.