Facilitating distributed co-creative activities within an innovation process involving multi-stakeholder perspectives such as diverse user groups, designers and organizational representatives is a challenging task. The distance on a conceptual level between participants has the potential to lead to both barriers and opportunities for co-creative activities, while also changing the role of the facilitator. The paper aim to explore this phenomenon further through the research question: How can facilitators work towards bridging conceptual distance between stakeholders in distributed multi-stakeholder co-creative innovation processes?’

The researcher investigated the work of facilitators within a co-creative innovation process of user generated content services with the media industry through a case study. A theoretical framework centered around communities of practice and boundary spanning were used to gain an understanding of the facilitators work. The study concludes that the development of a shared language, use of boundary objects to aid translation and outer-level brokering before and during innovation activities are important processes that a facilitator use to decrease conceptual distance.