Making Europe through co-creation: contrasting rationalities for integrating society in research and innovation

In the last decade, the European Union has given increasing attention to the involvement of diverse sectors of society in the production of knowledge, the design of profitable technologies, and the definition of solutions to societal challenges of different magnitudes. Involving citizens in research, knowledge production, and innovation has two main purposes. First, address the crises of lack of legitimacy of EU actions and of public mistrust in science and technological developments. Second, to exploit the creative potential of citizens to tackle problems and create economic value. The keyword that guides these activities is "co-creation". In this paper, we analyze representative case studies of three areas in which European funded projects have examined, designed, implemented, and strengthened co-creation activities oriented to facilitate the green and digital transformations while also contributing to European integration. These include open innovation projects on robotics, one alliance of the Erasmus+ funded European Universities Initiative (EUI), and a comparative explorative project on co-creation funded by the Horizon 2020 "Science with and for Society Programme" (SwafS). These projects are examined by looking at their overarching goals, methods, obstacles, and the "imaginaries of Europe-making" they put forward. The robotics projects mobilize co-creation to make Europe by accelerating acceptance of these technologies. The EUI alliance examined uses co-creation to form holistic European engineers and engineering education. The SwafS project intended to contribute to the making of Europe by identifying how to locally tailor innovation processes and solutions to locally defined challenges. The paper concludes that these imaginaries of Europe making through co-creation could be complementary, but there are multiple obstacles at the intersection of policy and practice to bring them together.