July 17, 2019

In today’s class session we talked about co-creation, and the creation of value through innovation in the public sector. This discussion was particularly important to our innovation proposal projects, because it helped us to think about what we were adding to the city of Seattle by proposing our job and personal growth workshop within the Seattle Children’s Museum (SCM). From the four types of value that we discussed in class, our group concluded that our workshop innovation added value by producing new results from the museum and also created new services to address previously unaddressed needs. By introducing a program to the museum which is different from the services they offer currently, the museum is producing new results for patrons. While normally their end result is enjoyment and education for visitors, and particularly children (indicated in their mission statement), introducing a job and personal growth workshop adds results for a different demographic of patrons (homeless mothers), and these are results which go beyond the visit to the museum. Women who attend the workshop will leave with new skills attractive to employers, a new and updated resume, LinkedIn profile, and experience networking with local businesses. Programs designed to attract homeless or underprivileged residents were already in place at the museum, but they were insufficient in their subsidization of the museum fee and did not address the issue of future employment for parents. By offering services that improve the lives of homeless families and cater to the wishes of this population, the SCM not only increases its own value, but the value of the entire city.

While our idea was very sound and clearly touched on the ideas and themes discussed throughout the program, our group had a very difficult time arriving at a harmonious decision, and today’s group meeting was particularly discordant. In particular, one graduate student in the group was unwilling to commit to this idea, despite the other five members of the group being on board. Ultimately, at today’s group meeting, she expressed that this had a lot to do with the friendship between myself, Jack, and Kenzie, and she felt that we were pushing our ideas onto the group without appropriately consulting her. This was definitely frustrating to hear, since our group spent two hours bouncing ideas off of each other a week ago, and she was a very active participant in choosing the target population, location, and aspects of the program itself. It also felt awkward to be called out in front of our other two group members, who didn’t seem to have any problems with the group dynamic or ill feelings towards Jack, Kenzie and I. Nonetheless, the three of us wanted to create a cohesive group dynamic, so we tried to take her criticisms into consideration and accommodate her throughout the rest of the meeting, but it was very hard to be cordial towards someone who had been openly uninvested in this program in the group meetings leading up to this one, especially when her main issue had nothing to do with work ethic and everything to do with our friendship. I am documenting this issue in my blog because I think it was a moment of pretty great personal growth for me. I was unsure how the tension with this group member would eventually play out (would we ignore it? Fight about it? Accommodate it?), and I was pleased to find that we were able to hold a very civil discussion where we each shared how we had been feeling during interactions with each other, and made pretty concrete goals for how interactions would get better in the future. Afterwards, we held a very productive group meeting and finalized all of our ideas for the innovation proposal, which was so nice to get finished!