Innovation Dynamics of Emerging Co-Creation Practices: What are the impacts on Inclusion?

创造技术的过程直接决定了谁能从一项技术中受益，以及它如何影响社会差异，以及历史歧视的特征，如性别、种族、阶级、国籍、移民身份和性别。拟议的项目创造了新的知识和评估方法，以了解具体的、新兴的创新趋势，同时考虑到地理效应。这项工作还创造了评估这些创新趋势与谁参与创新和谁从创新中受益的包容性之间的关系的方法。该项目描述了被称为共同创造实践的新兴创新活动，并评估了这些实践如何影响历史上被边缘化群体参与创新的程度，并在波士顿和底特律等几个城市中心的背景下体验到有益的结果。研究小组将进行访谈，了解初创企业孵化器、技术开发团队和政府机构如何领导创新过程，并考虑到社会中各种群体的需求。这项研究的成果将有助于美国地方和州政府制定促进包容性创新的政策，帮助更多的人从技术中受益。研究设计建立了参与共同创造创新实践的组织案例研究，重点关注机器人、自动驾驶汽车和城市能源领域。这些组织是“共同创造设施”（Co-Creation Facilities），旨在孵化初创公司，同时与潜在的最终用户建立密切联系；或者是“生活实验室”（Living Labs），寻求在与最终用户环境相似的环境中设计技术。该研究将考虑历史、人口、地理、文化和其他区域因素如何在案例研究组织行为和结果中发挥潜在作用。该研究的预期结果包括波士顿和底特律几个共同创造组织的详细案例研究叙述。对于每个案例研究组织，研究团队将使用系统架构框架来绘制组织的目标，并将这些目标与其结果进行比较。例如，目标可能包括为新成立的组织提供支持，以满足潜在的资助者，结果可能包括每年在创新中心内获得外部资金的新兴公司的数量。评估还将考虑创新进程在多大程度上扩大了遭受不成比例的有害歧视的群体的参与和安全。最后，该研究项目将为美国城市提出理论命题，以便将来与其他城市进行比较。该项目自始至终都包含公平问题——研究小组的组成、项目的设计和成果的传播都以扩大研究的影响为重点。该项目将包括本科生和研究生，将通过公开讲座传播研究成果，并将包括行业和国际合作伙伴关系。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The process for creating technology directly shapes who benefits from a technology and how it impacts societal disparities along characteristics of historic discrimination such as gender, race, class, national origin, immigration status, and sexuality. The proposed project creates new knowledge and evaluation methods to understand specific, emerging innovation trends while considering geographic effects. The work also creates methods to evaluate how these innovation trends relate to inclusiveness of who participates in and who benefits from innovation. The project describes the emerging innovation activities known as Co-Creation practices and evaluates how these practices may impact the extent to which historically marginalized groups participate in innovation and experience beneficial outcomes in the context of several urban centers: Boston and Detroit. The study team will perform interviews to learn the stories that describe how start-up incubators, technology development teams, and government agencies lead innovation processes that consider the needs of a variety of groups within society. The outcomes of this research will help local and state governments in the United States create policies that foster inclusive innovation that helps more people benefit from technology.The research design builds case studies of organizations that participate in Co-Creation Innovation Practices, focusing on the areas of robotics, autonomous vehicles, and urban energy. The organizations are "Co-Creation Facilities" that seek to incubate start-up companies while enabling close links to potential end-users or "Living Labs" that seek to design a technology in a context similar to the end-user environment. The study will consider how history, demographics, geography, culture, and other regional factors play a potential role in case study organization behavior and outcomes. The expected outcomes of the study include detailed case study narratives for several Co-Creation organizations in Boston and Detroit. For each case study organization, the research team will use the Systems Architecture Framework to map the objectives of the organization and compare these objectives with their outcomes. For example, objectives may include providing support to help start up organizations meet potential funders and outcomes may include the number of star- up companies within an Innovation Hub that receive external funding within each year. The evaluation will also consider the extent to which the innovation process expands participation and safety for groups that experience disproportionate, harmful discrimination. Finally, the research project will propose theoretical propositions for cities in the US that can be compared in the future to other cities. The project incorporates issues of equity throughout—the composition of the research team, the design of the project, and the dissemination of results all focus on broadening the impact of research. The project will incorporate undergraduate and graduate students, will disseminate research through publicly accessible lectures, and will include both industry and international partnerships.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.