VALUE CO-CREATION AND SOCIAL INNOVATION FOR A NEW GENERATION OF EUROPEAN LIBRARIES

LibrarIN is a research project that provides new avenues for participatory management and sustainable finance for European libraries, as key cultural institutions in their way to develop new functions, new services and new engagement with the individuals, organisations and the communities they serve. This requires social innovation based on public value co-creation and a demand-driven design of public library services that incorporate the opportunities provided by new technologies and new trends in service and user innovation to deliver outcomes serving a new generation of European public libraries. LibrarIN consists of i) an integrated conceptual framework to understand the process of value co-creation in public libraries service delivery, complemented with an evaluation of different approaches to knowledge transformation in public libraries, both in terms of their processes and their impact; ii) new metrics for public libraries transformation and new empirical case studies on existent and ongoing efforts to develop innovative public services in ways that enable the co-creation of value, including a novel European survey on innovation in public libraries; iii) Policy and managerial recommendations, and policy and managerial tools, to implement new ideas and scaling up best-practice experiences that effectively use value-co-creation to unlock social assets. The policy tools also include indicators for monitoring and evaluating existing initiatives to support public libraries service transformation. LibrarIN has a particular focus on three co-creation areas: digital transformation, living labs, and social entrepreneurship and public-private-third sector innovation networks.