Co-creating social and sustainable innovation in Makerspaces and Fab Labs. Lessons learnt from the SISCODE European project

“Making” and the Fourth Industrial Revolution have been extensively investigated in the last few years. Several pieces of research have been carried out on the topic of fab lab networks and makers movements; in many cases, these studies highlighted problems of their economic sustainability, stressing -however- their cultural-related role.

Nowadays, it is evident that Makerspaces and Fab Labs do not only produce physical goods, but they also develop knowledge and relationships, which are expressed through physical productions and activities.

The European Union has been particularly interested in the study and development of innovative ecosystems, which might serve as levers for sustainable growth, because of their focus on co-creation and the involvement of different groups of stakeholders. SISCODE Horizon 2020 project was developed according to this European requirement. Within the SISCODE project, a co-creation methodology for societal challenges was proposed and tested throughout ten pilot projects carried out by Living Labs, Science Museums and Makerspaces, and Fab Labs.

In this paper, we are going to present the three pilot projects developed by three Makerspaces and Fab Labs (Polifactory (Milan), Maker (Copenhagen), and Fab Lab Barcelona) and discuss main insights on co-creation practices.