Collaborative Innovation That Makes a Difference
We design and facilitate co-creation events that bring people together across sectors and communities to solve real problems, shape local priorities, and unlock ideas that stick.
Whether you’re tackling health inequality, urban regeneration, local service design or community-led innovation, we help you involve the people who matter and build solutions that work in practice.
What We Do
We create and facilitate structured, high-energy sessions that:
- Engage residents, community groups, businesses, local authorities, and service providers
- Build trust, focus and collaboration across diverse participants
- Engage residents, community groups, businesses, local authorities, and service providers
- Build trust, focus and collaboration across diverse participants
- Use creative, inclusive methods to surface insight and generate ideas
- Turn shared knowledge into concrete next steps, with clear ownership
Every session is built around your specific community goals, and we provide all the tools, structure and support needed to make the process a success.
How It Works
Our co-creation approach typically includes:
- Stakeholder Mapping – identifying key participants and voices that need to be included
- Empathy & Insight Building – surfacing lived experience and shared challenges
- Facilitated Ideation – generating ideas and testing what might work
- Prototyping & Feedback – shaping early solutions that reflect real needs
- Action Planning – setting out who’s doing what, and how progress will be made
A Few Examples
Hydration & Health with Northumbrian Water and the NHS
At Northumbrian Water’s Innovation Festival, we led a sprint exploring how to encourage better hydration in vulnerable communities. NHS and utility professionals collaborated with citizens to co-create practical, low-cost ideas that promoted health, sustainability and access to clean tap water.
Revitalising North Ormesby with Thirteen Housing Group
We brought together more than 80 local residents in North Ormesby, Middlesbrough, for a three-day co-creation event. Through focused activities and real-time planning, the community identified what mattered most—and worked together to develop practical, funded actions to improve their neighbourhood.
Who It’s For
- Housing associations engaging communities in shaping their future
- Councils, combined authorities and local partnerships building plans with residents
- Utilities, health and transport providers embedding public voice into service change
- Businesses seeking to align innovation with local impact
- Community-led projects that need external facilitation and structure
Let’s Talk
If you need to bring communities and partners together to solve challenges or shape the future—we’ll help you make it happen.
Contact us to plan your co-creation event.
Co-creation for Community Solutions
We are experienced at running successful events online and in-person that bring communities together to collaborate and shape a way forward together.
Working with NHS, Northumbrian Water and the Community
In 2019 we designed and facilitated an ‘innovation daily dash’ at Northumbrian Water’s Innovation Festival 2019, at the awesome Newcastle Racecourse venue.
Here’s how Northumbrian Water were promoting the event on their Innovation Festival 2019 website:
“This daily dash will explore ways to encourage people to drink more tap water so that they stay hydrated. There are so many benefits to being hydrated and so many problems can occur when hydration levels are low, especially amongst vulnerable groups such as the elderly and unwell. We want to identify innovative ways to promote hydration as a key factor in keeping people healthy.”
Water Well Being with Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals
We facilitated around 30 attendees from the NHS, Northumbrian Water and others from different organisations and professions, so a very diverse group. And as is the case for many community co-creation events, this meant that the facilitation plan needed to be designed with flexibility and accessibility for everyone in mind.
The solution presentations by the participants were absolutely awesome. Packed with great ideas, and when they have all been combined, we are confident that they will make a significant difference towards solving the big question that we started off with at the beginning of the day.
Working with Thirteen Housing Group and the Community of North Ormesby
We worked with Thirteen Housing Group and over 80 community members from North Ormesby, Middlesbrough to design and facilitate a 3-day event designed to generate ideas and changes that the residents wanted to see in the area.
The ‘Your Choice North Ormesby’ event in Middlesbrough invited as many people as possible in the community to come along and have their say on questions such as: ‘what works well now?’; ‘what’s missing from the community?’; and ‘what do you want to see in future?’ The partners running the event, including Thirteen and Middlesbrough Council, have since been working together with the residents to design and select the best developments.
If you would like to talk to us about designing and facilitating your community co-creation event, please do get in touch – jo@bigbangpartnership.co.uk.
