Knowledge Creation in Co-Design Activities: Business-driven Collaboration in the Development of a Digital Communication Tool

The goal of this paper was to explore the nature of university students’ and company representatives’ knowledge creation when they collaborated in co-design activities. Studies focusing on companies’ collaboration with universities and students primarily centres around how companies contrib-ute to students’ learning of entrepreneurial skills and to the development of higher education curricula and its inclusion of entrepreneurial assets. Thus, there is a lack of understanding what kind of knowledge that students and companies jointly develop in collaborative design practices. The study ap-plied Dewey’s theory on experience highlighting matters of social condi-tions of experiences as well as reflective thinking. The research was gener-ated by means of qualitative group interviews. The analytical approach was thematic and identified three themes: (1) Genuine collaborative engage-ment; (2) Challenges in trying new things; and (3) Knowledge creation premises. These themes revealed different kinds of knowledge creation that took place in the co-design activities. For example, how te challenges inher-ent in the co-design activities encouraged the students to take risks, to work in completely new ways and to try out new ways of arguing for certain choices, which helped them to actively engage in the collaboration as an equal partner. In this way, the study contributes to questions of the kinds of knowledge that students and companies collaboratively create when en-gaged in co-design activities. It should however be noted that this study is based on a small sample of participants and accordingly more research is needed to validate these conclusions.