Co-Creating User Stories: A Tool for Making Sense of Business Opportunities

This article discusses co-creation as a means of sensemaking among business-to-business actors, and presents a case study from the information and communications sector, in which the aim is to understand current and future media consumption and behaviour. We propose to expand the notion of co-creation in such a way that it also recognizes interaction and sensemaking between different stakeholders within an industry or sector, compared to the current view, in which the focus is on the consumers’ role in co-creation activities. Stakeholder co-creation entails jointly creating meaning of a chosen complex phenomenon by using practical tools, such as narratives in the form of user stories. Sensemaking is a narrative process and can thus be used in combination with practical facilitation tools in order to co-create user stories or other stories, and in other contexts.