As we announced in here few months ago chemical giant BASF is on a mission to celebrate its 150^th anniversary this 2015: to connect people and ideas in six locations worldwide with the goal of addressing global challenges as urban living, energy, food or water.

To spark the discussion, the company launched Creator Space, a global co-creation program shaped as both a digital interactive platform and a yearlong event series taking place in six different cities: Mumbai, Shanghai, New York City, São Paulo, Barcelona and Ludwigshafen. Each city stop in the Creator Space tour explores a locally relevant topic. Each meeting’s aim is to become for a week a space for co-creation and innovation, generating critical though, awareness and understanding about a particular challenge.

October 26th to 30th was Barcelona’s turn, as the city hosted the fifth stop of BASF Creator Space Tour, dedicated to address the challenges of responsible food consumption. That week, the Mediterranean city became a platform for a multidisciplinary exchange on the subject, bringing together customers, suppliers, employees, scientists, creative professionals, students, representatives of the government administrations, NGOs and several citizens. In total, more than 500 specialists to address the challenge of feeding a growing world population through a sustainable supply of food.

The event, hosted at the unique piece of architecture Design Hub of Barcelona, included a 24 hours Creatathon in the format of the hackathons, different cultural activities, a Cinema forum based on the documentary “Just eat it: a food waste story”, a Co-creator Kids Day, and a final pitch session for the finalist of top eight projects on intelligent energy proposed by different BASF partners.

But the Barcelona Creator Space kicked off with a Summit, a two days event in which Co-Society played a key role managing an intense collaborative work of more than 70 leading experts in healthy eating habits or representing different links of the entire value chain of food production, distribution and consumption.

Some of the organizations collaborating in the process with their experts were the Fundación Dieta Mediterránea (Mediterranean Diet Foundation), the Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology (IRTA), which is attached to the Department of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries, Food and the Natural Environment of the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government), and the Waste Agency of Catalonia (ARC).

Those experts were asked to join together and share knowledge and ideas to design innovative proposals, both from a business and social perspective, to respond to three specific challenges:

•      Solutions to help citizens adopt a healthy and sustainable diet
•      Solutions to increase the efficiency of the water resources of the Spanish agricultural sector
•      Solutions to reduce food waste and to optimise waste management in Barcelona

A team from Co-Society used different co-creation tools and techniques to direct two days of work and discussion of six different groups, each one of them composed by 10-12 people contributing with their own expert knowledge and expertise to find solutions for one of the challenges. Co-Society team also helped them to formulate the ideas in a final “elevator’s pitch” session in which each proposal was presented to the rest of experts participating in the co-creation process.

A total of 15 solutions were presented that, beyond its potential implementation, already resulted in strengthening personal relationships beyond professional networking and the feeling of sharing a wish for changing the world for the better and contributing to it through co-innovation.

Creator Space tour: Barcelona