Since around 2007, a new term has entered the Danish government's efforts to drive regulatory reform and make it easier to start and run a small business: burden-hunting. Widely reported in the business press, civil servants ventured out to conduct on-site field research, engaging with company owners, finance officers and accounting staff to better understand what it is like to own a business and to be at the receiving end of bureaucracy and red tape (MindLab, 2008). These civil servants, from across three different government departments, had been trained by MindLab in ethnographic research techniques and, through a process of co-creation, invited companies to be part of the development and testing of new policy and service solutions. In March 2009, when the strategy was finally presented to the public by (then) deputy Prime Minister Ms Lene Espersen, the event took place in the rugged facility of a medium-sized Greyhound-type bus operator that had itself been subject to an on-site visit by the burden hunters. A number of the innovative policy initiatives launched that day, including a new single account number for all payments to public agencies, would not have been possible without the burden hunters’ efforts. The approach was so successful that in 2010 the Danish Ministry of Finance proposed that a new programme to identify and remove administrative burdens for citizens should also build, to a high degree, on the ‘burden hunter method’.

Co-creation is the explicit involvement over time of people to identify, define and describe a new approach (Scharmer, 2007; Sanders and Stappers, 2008). Building on the foundation presented in the two previous chapters, co-creation is about orchestrating a design process with citizens, businesses and other stakeholders. This entails reconceptualising citizens not as subject but as equal partners in design and delivery, and recognising people as assets (Sanders and Stappers, 2008; Gillinson et al, 2010; Boyle et al, 2010). For the public manager or project manager, the key challenge is how to effectively facilitate the process, recognising that ‘the entire journey from idea to results is fraught with danger’ (Eggers and O’Leary, 2009, p 85). How can we reap the benefits of this emerging paradigm of public sector innovation?