We believe in building ventures, projects and public services with the people that use them.  This process is called co-creation.

We love it because it brings many perspectives into the design of an initiative, encourages experimentation and makes building social ventures a lot of fun.

We apply co-creation as part of our incubation cycles as well as to UNDP’s other activities and projects.

The teams that enter Kolba’s incubation cycle are immediately immersed in a co-creation process.  From this foundation they build their ventures.

So how does it work?

We base our workshops on the design thinking methodology made famous by the d.school at Stanford University.

Source: Stanford University d.School

For an example of how this works, check out how we applied it to the issue of mobility across Bratislava’s public transport network.

Depending on the challenges to be addressed, we pepper the design workshop with tools and activities drawn from the DIY toolkit and service design.

Thus every design workshop has similar structure and principles, but no workshop is ever the same.