Stakeholder engagement is certainly a challenging process! Confusion over its terminology and concepts sometimes adds to this challenge. So, before we continue, let’s look at some definitions.

•  Stakeholders are those groups who affect and/or could be affected by an organization’s activities, products, or services and associated performance. This does not include all those who may have knowledge of or views about an organization. An organization has many stakeholders, each with distinct types and levels of involvement and influence, and often with diverse and sometimes conflicting interests and concerns.
• Stakeholder engagement aims to establish a platform where various stakeholders’ ideas and information are shared and assimilated. In this process, mutual trust and respect can be built among different stakeholders through dialogue and social learning. Thus, stakeholder engagement can increase transparency, decision-making processes (as well as stakeholders’ active participation in the decision-making process), and acceptance of credible and “neutral” results.
• Co-creation is the collaborative development of new value (concepts, solutions, products and services) together with experts and/or stakeholders (such as customers, suppliers etc.). Co-creation is a form of collaborative innovation: ideas are shared and improved together, rather than kept to oneself.
• Co-design is an approach to actively involving all stakeholders (e.g., employees, partners, customers, citizens, and end users) in the design process to help ensure the result meets their needs and is usable.