For many brands, co-creation has long been a global trend.
But for an increasing number of major cities around the world, it’s also gone international as they collaborate with one another in order to address wide-ranging issues involving everything from traffic to to housing to the arts.
“For almost everything we are doing that is new,” says Leonardo Barchini Rosa, the head of Sao Paulo’s international affairs department, “we try to look outside.”
Recently, the Chicago Tribune reported that before ramping up the number of bus lanes running through its canyon-like downtown streets Sao Paulo – South America’s largest city at 11 million people – first studied how such systems work in Paris, London, New York and Buenos Aires.
The metropolis also did the same kind of international fact-finding and collaboration before it launched a controversial jobs-and-housing program for crack addicts and a public-private venture to modernize street lights.
This strategy – also employed by London, Hong Kong, New York and other megacities – has been labeled as “foreign policy for cities,” “city diplomacy” and “paradiplomacy.”
But whatever it’s called, it’s co-creation – and civic leaders are using its power to extend their international efforts beyond traditional business attraction moves and branch into collaboration in the arts, education and urban issues, from pollution to poverty.
“If done well,” writes the Tribune about co-creation measures, “a city can garner a reputation as a hotbed of innovation, a team player on pressing urban problems and a prime location for foreign investment, business partnerships and tourism.”
As an example, Sao Paulo recently was ranked No. 1 “Latin American City of the Future” by fDi Intelligence and has attracted more than 500 projects between 2010 and 2014, the report noted.
If co-creation can accomplish that for sprawling cities with all their complex dynamics and disparate issues, imagine what working hand-in-hand to co-create with your customers and employees could potentially accomplish for your brand.
To learn more about the AE CoCreation Lab Series™ and what it can do for your company, simply click here.