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How analysing co-creation during the Covid-19 pandemic offers insights on the simultaneous generation of academic, social and business value

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Dr Muthu de Silva from the department of Management gives an overview of the findings of two recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reports, published with her co-authors, about the role co-creation played during the Covid-19 pandemic, and how it can shape innovation going forward.  

Co-creation is a mechanism of simultaneously generating academic, business and social value. During co-creation actors of the innovation ecosystem – such as businesses, universities, governments, intermediaries and society – act as collaborators to integrate their knowledge, resources, and networks to generate mutual benefits. The idea behind co-creation is that the joint efforts towards change or impact can lead to lasting and effective innovation.  

As an institution, Birkbeck is committed to delivering theoretically rigorous research with real-terms, practical impact, and a concept like co-creation is a really great way to facilitate this. Co-creating with non-academics enables academics to integrate needs and resources of both academic and non-academic communities, enhancing the reach and usefulness of their research.   

Over the years, I’ve published about 20 journal articles on the topic of co-creation and received eight best paper awards for these publications. In 2019, I was invited by the Working Party on Innovation and Technology Policy of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to develop a conceptual framework on co-creation between science and industry. This meant publishing a high quality journal article and leading their 2021 – 2024 co-creation project that directly influences the strategies of innovation agencies, and ministries of 37 countries who belong to the OECD, and a wider audience that benefits from OECD publications.  

This work resulted in two reports and a journal article designed to influence innovation strategies of OECD member states. It has also resulted in leading another project regarding the importance of university and industry co-creation for a societal and economic green transition.  

Based on evidence gathered from 30 COVID-19 co-creation initiatives from 21 countries and three international cases, the two reports showed that co-creation was widely used to respond to the challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. What was evident through the reports was that existing co-creation networks enabled the rapid emergence of new initiatives to address urgent needs, while digital technologies enabled establishing new – and, where necessary, socially distanced – collaborations.  

For instance, co-creation of medical innovation relied on substantially larger existing networks due to the complexity of medical discovery and manufacturing processes involved in developing these innovations. The COVID-19 Türkiye Platform, the transnational Exscalate4CoV, and the UK’s Oxford-AstraZeneca initiatives are examples of this. Digital tools were also used in numerous ways. As an example, the COVID Moonshot project which aimed to develop antiviral drugs against COVID-19 by identifying new molecules that could block SARS-CoV-2, involved three scientists who organised a hackathon inviting researchers/virologists to submit molecules, donations and assays (testing) via Twitter, resulting in over 4 000 submissions.  

Aside from funding initiatives, governments engaged actively in co-creation by granting access to their networks, advising on initiative goals and offering support to improve quick delivery.  The role of civil society was important as well, and the socially impactful nature of research and innovation was a motivating factor for engagement. For example, the Austrian COVID-19 Pop-up Hub initiative; the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology co-developed the themes (Digital Health, Distancing, Economic Buffers and State Intervention) for public virtual discussion and participatory policy idea development taking place via the Hub.  

What emerged from the reports, were the following lessons for the design and implementation of future policy programmes for co-creation:   

  • Purpose is the strongest driver of co-creation; incentives to support co-creation should go beyond facilitating access to funding.  
  • Crisis-specific programmes may not be needed out of the crisis, but networks and infrastructures should be strengthened during “normal” times. 
  • There is room for building new collaborations between researchers and producers to accelerate innovation during “normal” times.  
  • Policy should support wider development and use of digital tools for co-creation.  
  • New approaches should be leveraged more to tap into the large pool of diverse and readily available capacities in the economy.  
  • Governments’ involvement in co-creation activities as network builders can help speed up solutions; enhanced agility in their operations should be encouraged.  
  • Public engagement in co-creation can help market uptake of new solutions. 

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From improving assessment centres to preventing match fixing: Birkbeck’s business and management research

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All Birkbeck’s REF 2021 impact case studies in business and management were rated ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’. Discover our research case studies below. Full details can be found on the REF website.

Reforming governance in the UK non-profit sport sector

Following a series of scandals in the UK sports sector, research completed since 2011 by Birkbeck’s Richard Tacon and Geoff Walters has shaped significant reforms to the country’s sports governance landscape.

In particular, their work underpins the Voluntary Code for Good Governance, published by the Sports and Recreation Alliance in 2011 and revised in 2014; and through this, the Code for Sports Governance introduced at the recommendation of the UK government by Sport England and UK Sport in 2016. All sports organisations applying for UK government funding must comply with this code, which has therefore not only influenced the distribution of over £500 million between 2016 and 2022, but has also brought about significant change in individual organisations, who have reformed their governance procedures in order to comply with this essential requirement.

Numerous smaller, unfunded organisations have additionally signed up to the Sport and Recreation Alliance’s Principles of Good Governance, a voluntary code which is also based on Tacon and Walters’ research. Across the sector, governing boards are now better managed and more diverse. As such, this research can be seen to have shaped the entire UK sport sector and affected the lives and playing experiences of the millions of Britons who participate in organised sport each year.

Mobilizing the power of trade unions

John Kelly’s mobilization theory, first proposed in Rethinking Industrial Relations (1998) but refined and developed over the two decades since, offers an account of the conditions under which individual employees collectivise in response to problems at work (a sense of grievance, shared with fellow workers; a target to whom blame can be attached; and a belief that there are forms of collective action that will make a difference). The theory was taken up rapidly by trade union activists and has been widely used in trade union education programmes since 2004. In the period since 2014, major unions with a combined membership of over six million workers have drawn on Kelly’s work to educate union organisers and to inform the development of major campaigns.

In particular, Kelly ran and designed the ‘Leading Change’ programme for the Trades Union Congress (TUC), which ran between 2004 and 2018 and whose participants have gone on to become MPs, union general secretaries, and in one case the General Secretary of the Labour Party. Kelly’s work also underpins training programmes for the Public and Commercial Services Union, Universities and Colleges Union, and the NEU (National Education Union).

Kelly’s influence matters because unionized workplaces provide better terms and conditions, on average, than their non-union counterparts. The aggregated figures from the unions with which Kelly and his work have been associated tell us that between 2014 and 2020, millions of employees at thousands of workplaces received higher pay, longer holidays and better fringe benefits such as sick pay. Moreover, the achievement of collective bargaining over terms and conditions of employment means that these newly unionized workers now have more say in workplace decisions than would otherwise have been the case.

Don’t Fix It! Fighting match-fixing in European football

Match-fixing is a problem for professional sports because a perception of unfairness makes them less attractive to spectators, and because of the harm done to players (typically those who are younger, vulnerable, and less well-paid) who may be groomed or blackmailed into participating. It is also a wider social issue because match-fixing is typically orchestrated by criminal groups in order to fund their other activities. After a set of 2011-12 survey results revealed a worrying prevalence of match-fixing in the Eastern European football leagues in particular, Birkbeck researchers Sean Hamil, Andy Harvey, and Haim Levi were recruited in 2013-14 by FIFPro, the global football players’ union, to conduct research into football match fixing. Their work on the Don’t Fix It! project surveyed footballers from eight European countries and formed the basis for a code of conduct adopted by every key stakeholder organisation in European football, as well as a training programme that saw national associations develop and deliver anti-match-fixing initiatives in each of the countries concerned.

Don’t Fix It! also underpinned the development of the Red Button App for anonymously reporting match-fixing. Harvey and Hamil’s research identified the lack of a clear reporting avenue as a key impediment to reducing match-fixing and it is this that the app addresses. First developed with the Finnish football players’ union, this has now been adopted worldwide, with both FIFA and UEFA agreeing to recognise the app as a valid avenue for match-fixing reports. Another European project has seen the app expanded into sports beyond football, protecting both players and the sports they play.

Developing a co-creation model for innovation in the UK and EU

Working with major policy institutions such as the Big Innovation Centre, Innovate UK, the UK Intellectual Property Office, and the European Commission, Birkbeck researchers Brigitte Andersen, Federica Rossi, and Muthu De Silva have reshaped national and international approaches to the ways in which businesses and universities can best work together. Their research on knowledge co-creation has been a catalyst for major policy reform in the UK and EU. Andersen’s work as rapporteur for a 2012 European Commission expert group on open innovation fed directly into the delivery framework for the EU’s €80 billion Horizon 2020 programme, which has supported countless researchers and research projects across the continent. De Silva’s work with the Intellectual Property Office supported changes to the Lambert Toolkit, which is used by universities to set the terms for their engagement with business. Andersen and De Silva’s collaboration with HEFCE through the Big Innovation Centre (of which Andersen is CEO) helped to ensure the introduction of impact criteria into REF 2014, reforming the impact landscape in UKHE. And the Catapult to Success report, published in 2013, underpinned the development of the UK’s Catapult Centres and the distribution of over £1 billion in government funding.

Making assessment centres work for employers

The assessment centre process, in which candidates for a role or promotion are asked to perform a series of tasks under observation and evaluated on their performance, is widely used in employee selection, development, and promotion processes around the world. Work by Birkbeck researchers Duncan Jackson and Chris Dewberry has challenged received wisdom about assessment centre design, demonstrating that traditional dimension-based assessment (which seeks to measure candidates’ performance against specific skills or competencies) does not provide an accurate prediction of performance in-role. Instead, they propose a task-based model which replaces the abstract skill testing of a dimension-based assessment centre with a focus on candidate performance in specific, job-relevant tasks. This produces more consistent results which therefore allow employers to make better choices when it comes to promotion or recruitment.

Jackson and Dewberry’s work has been taken up by a variety of recruitment and HR consultants around the world, from America to Australasia to the Middle East. These consultancies have reshaped the tools they work with based on Birkbeck research and in doing so have improved their service to dozens of large-scale, multinational companies – providing economic benefits to the consultancies and their clients as well as benefiting the diverse customer-bases of these clients by ensuring that their service providers are run by the most competent candidates. Jackson and Dewberry have also worked directly with individual employers to improve their provision (including a London-based public service organisation which accounts for over 25% of the national budget for this service) and have helped to shape practice worldwide by contributing to the national and international guidance on assessment centres provided by British and international psychological societies.

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Research with Impact: Economics, Mathematics and Statistics

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Through the REF 2021 rankings, we were pleased to see our impact results in Economics, Maths, and Statistics demonstrate a significant improvement from 2014, with 33% of our impact work ranked world-leading, 50% internationally excellent, and the remaining 17% internationally recognised. Discover our research case studies below. Visit the REF website for full details.

Demographic structure and economic trends: planning for Europe’s financial future

According to a 2019 OECD report, Fiscal Challenges and Inclusive Growth in Ageing Societies, ‘The number of people over 65 for each working-age person will at least double in most G20 countries by 2060′. This is important because age groups differ in their savings behaviour, productivity levels, labour input, contribution to innovation, and investment opportunities. Research by Professor Yunu Aksoy and Professor Ron Smith offered new insight into the specific nature of these differences as well as providing an innovative theoretical model for predicting future trends. Taken up by central banks around the world, this work has contributed to an increased focus on demographics amongst the global central banking community and influenced fiscal policy decisions in a number of countries.

Notably, a 2017 secondment to the Bank of Spain allowed Professor Aksoy to develop his research, to publish alongside Bank economist Henrique Basso, and to help answer the question of ‘how to adapt fiscal and social policies to demographic changes’, identified by the Bank’s head of research as ‘one of the most important issues’ that the Bank is currently facing. Basso went on to sit on a European Central Bank taskforce charged with investigating the future of pension schemes in the EU (a multi-billion-Euro question), which drew directly on Professor Aksoy and Professor Smith’s work to inform its research and recommendations. The work has also been invoked in German debates around immigration (where a recent policy change aimed to facilitate the entry of young, skilled workers to reinvigorate the country’s economy).

Making the right decisions for patients: competition, choice and inequality in publicly-funded healthcare

Successive UK governments have emphasised the importance of patient choice as a means for service users to voice and realise their preferences, and as a way to encourage competition in markets for publicly-funded healthcare. Dr Walter Beckert’s work on patient choice has challenged the assumption that increasing competition helps to improve care provision, showing that competition can reinforce existing inequalities between demographic groups and that patients often turn for guidance to primary healthcare practitioners who have competing priorities of their own.

Dr Beckert is an academic panel member for the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and his research has shaped the methodology used by the CMA to analyse the impact of hospital mergers, therefore influencing each of the eight hospital merger decisions made by that body since its first in 2013 (determining the allocation of at least £560 million in public money). More broadly, Dr Beckert’s work with the Health Foundation, a campaigning charity, has helped to change opinion within the sector as to the value of competition and has contributed to a strategic shift away from competition and towards a more collaborative approach to service delivery, as realised in the 2019 NHS Long-Term Plan. Health Foundation CEO Jennifer Dixon points out that ‘the reach of Walter’s work therefore potentially affects all the population in England – circa 55 million’.

New strategies for portfolio management: applying new estimates of equity yields and equity duration

Accurate estimates of expected rates of returns and investment time horizons are crucial for investment managers when it comes to assessing the risk and return characteristics of equity portfolios. Collaborative research originated by Birkbeck’s Dr David Schröder and continued in partnership with Florian Esterer, an asset management professional, proposed a new method for predicting returns and estimating risk on individual shares, using earnings forecasts created by analysts across the market. They also proposed for the first time the concept of equity duration, which sits alongside the well-established idea of bond duration (a measurement of sensitivity to interest rate changes).

Analysts and investment managers at asset management firms across the financial sector took up Schröder and Esterer’s work, featuring the research in internal research reports and in some cases inviting them in to deliver in-person explanations. Feedback from the Head of European Qualitative Research at one of these major international firms described Schröder and Esterer’s research as ‘crucial’ in reframing its approach ‘to measuring the duration of global stocks’, demonstrating direct impact on the billions of pounds of assets that this firm holds under its management. Esterer was also able to put the research into practice at his own workplace, which also manages tens of billions in equity holdings.

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Research with Impact – Department of Computer Science and Information Systems

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The impact case studies submitted by our Department of Computer Science and Information Systems were rated 67% 4* (world-leading) and 33% 3* (internationally excellent), demonstrating the significant effect that Birkbeck research is having on populations both in London and around the world. More details about each case study are given below; they can be found in full on the REF website.

Enhancing Vehicle Deployment Strategies at the London Ambulance Service

When somebody is critically ill, the speed at which an ambulance can reach them can be a matter of life or death. Ensuring ambulance coverage across a given region is therefore critically important, and an important part of maintaining this coverage is understanding how long it will take an ambulance to get from point A to point B. This is particularly true in London, where the London Ambulance Service (LAS) works across the UK’s most densely populated area, requiring ambulances to contend with high volumes of traffic as they carry out their work.

Working with PhD student Marcus Poulton, who was then employed by the LAS, Birkbeck researchers George Roussos and David Weston (and their collaborator, Anastasios Noulas of the NYU Data Science Institute) were able to improve the mapping systems used to predict ambulance travel times around the capital. Their software, tailored for the specific travel patterns of emergency vehicles (which are, for example, able to use some road sections that ordinary vehicles cannot) are 80% more accurate than the previous best-in-class and are integral to the Geotracker software used by LAS despatchers to plan the movement of the service’s vehicles around the capital. According to LAS staff, ‘The work from Birkbeck has changed the way we map and deploy ambulances for the better, and that means helping to save lives.’

Virtual Knowledge Graphs in industry and the public sector

Virtual knowledge graph technology is used in situations where an organisation holds a high volume of complex data across databases and repositories that may not have been designed to work together. By defining and mapping these disparate pieces of information, a VKG allows ordinary users to search across these multiple datasets in a natural, straightforward way. The benefits to this technology can be enormous, as staff members are able to find in minutes information that previously required the involvement of IT specialists over several days or weeks.

Birkbeck researchers Michael Zakharyaschev and Roman Kontchakov are at the forefront of VKG development. Their work is cited in the World Wide Web Committee’s definition of OWL 2 QL, a subset of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) that is used for writing virtual knowledge graphs and which is in use within such systems worldwide. Zakharyaschev and Kontchakov have also contributed directly to the development of one specific VKG system, Ontop, based at the University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy. Organisations around the world are using Ontop to carry out complex data analysis in a huge variety of fields, from the Norwegian oil and gas industry to Brazilian cancer research, bringing economic, social, political and health benefits to the populations that they serve.

Global Standards for Smart City infrastructure: Entity Identification Systems

Smart cities, which use information and communications technology to run key services like transport and sanitation, are growing in number around the globe. To function effectively, smart cities need a robust system of entity identification that allows them to distinguish unique items such as artefacts, products, and buildings. Worldwide, these systems are numerous, often incompatible, and frequently in direct competition with one another, which makes it difficult to transfer learning from one city to another and therefore slows down innovation. This matters because smart cities have been shown to be more efficient, healthier, and more environmentally sustainable than their traditional counterparts, with a 2018 report from McKinsey stating that ‘smart technologies can reduce fatalities by 8-10 percent, accelerate emergency response times by 20-35 percent, shave the average commute time by 15-20 percent, reduce the disease burden by 8-15 percent, lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 10-15 percent, and reduce water consumption by 20-30 percent’.

As a key member of the International Telecommunications Union’s study group on smart cities (SG20), George Roussos worked to develop a worldwide standard for global information infrastructure: ITU-T Y.4805. This specifies the functionality for federated entity identification services in Smart City applications, ensuring that such systems are interoperable and secure. As part of a package of ITU standards around the development of smart cities and the internet of things, Roussos’s work has underpinned smart city implementations around the world, notably in China and Africa, and feeds into the Smart Sustainable City standards towards which cities from Montevideo to Dubai are working.

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