I recently had the opportunity to serve as a judge for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s COZAD New Venture Challenge (Medical track). The COZAD competition is a culminating showcase of student innovation, where interdisciplinary teams spend months refining ideas that sit at the intersection of technology, healthcare, and human need. By the time teams present, they’ve dedicated months of effort to moving beyond ideas and into concept development, shaped through customer discovery, prototyping, and iteration. As a judge, my role was to evaluate not only the scientific and commercial viability of these ventures, but also their clarity of purpose, ethical grounding, and potential for real-world impact.
What struck me most throughout the day wasn’t just the ingenuity of the ideas, though there was plenty of that, but something more subtle unfolding beyond the pitch decks and prototypes: a shared language and appreciation of collaboration. Once my judging responsibilities were complete, I found myself lingering. I was curious how these teams understood co-creation; not as a buzzword, but as a lived experience. What did it mean to them and their start-ups? What did it feel like in practice? Where did it work well, and where did it strain?
To explore these questions, I invited a few participants into a brief experiment. If co-creation is ultimately about building something together, could we experience it in real time, and particularly outside of our familiar territories? Given that most of us came from STEM backgrounds, our training in writing has largely been scientific: structured, precise, and objective. There can be comfort found in that clarity, but fewer opportunities to explore more expressive forms of writing.
So we tried something different.
I decided that our challenge would be to write a poem to explore the topic and proposed questions surrounding co-creation. To do this, I moved between teams, introducing the prompt and inviting each group to contribute a section of the poem. Each subsequent group picked up where the last left off. While teams were welcomed to offer critique to earlier sections, I served as the primary facilitator and editor, making the final decision on if existing content would be revised based on how strongly held particular thoughts or words were by former teams.
This process revealed distinct layers of co-creation: creating in real time with those around you, while also interpreting and building upon the thinking of those who came before you, despite having no direct interaction with them. Before finalizing the piece, I completed a light editing pass to ensure cohesion and flow.
Borrowed Courage
We begin in fragments—
half-ideas, half-sentences,
a quiet uncertainty hovering between us.
Someone speaks first,
not because they are ready,
but because silence needs a shape.
A thread appears—thin, tentative—
and we reach for it together,
careful not to pull too hard.
Your words lean into mine,
mine stumble into yours,
and somewhere in between, something holds.
We disagree in small, necessary ways—
edges meeting, not always aligning—
friction sparking a different kind of clarity.
There is a moment
where I loosen my grip
on needing to be right.
And in that space,
something larger than ownership
begins to take form.
We borrow courage from each other,
pass it back and forth
like a shared language we are still learning to speak.
What felt unfamiliar softens—
not because it is easy,
but because it is no longer carried alone.
We are building without a blueprint,
trusting that direction can emerge
from attention, from presence, from care.
And when we step back,
what we see is not mine or yours—
but unmistakably ours.
There’s something powerful about holding this exercise in a professional setting. In such settings, we often default to our domains of expertise and established frameworks. But co-creation invites us to stretch beyond those boundaries. To try things that might feel “not for us.” To rely on others not just for their skills, but for their varied perspectives.
Of course, co-creation isn’t without its challenges. It can be time-intensive. It requires alignment without enforcing uniformity. It asks participants to balance individual voice with collective direction. And perhaps most importantly, it depends on psychological safety, which isn’t always an easy condition to establish.
But when it works, it creates something, whether a medical product or poem, that no single contributor could have produced alone.