Highlights this week in Co-Creation News: Two articles on how to create an online community: one from Business 2 Community on whether to use an open, closed or mixed model, and one on Fortune about the difficulty (and rewards) of building one.   Kathrin Winkler writes on Sustainable Business Forum about Contextual Inquiry:

We learn more from observing our customers "in the wild" than from querying them about what they want. Yes, listening to them is important - but the real revelations about how to delight them come from watching them work, noticing what makes them scowl (or worse, swear), seeing when they smile, and listening to how they interact with one another.

Local Motors, the Co-Creative auto company, announces a new design contest:

Local Motors in partnership with Shell's GameChanger team are hosting DRIVEN - Design of Relevant and Innovative Vehicles for Energy Needs - a competition seeking innovative transportation solutions to address mobility challenges on Local Motors' The Forge, an online, open co-creation forum. Design teams are invited to submit innovative solutions to address key mobility challenges in selected geographies.

eYeka releases the results of their survey on the Co-Creative practices of the French market:

Together with Professor Eric Vernette from Toulouse, France, we found out that these consumers are actually more willing to engage in co-creation than “regular” consumers. In this post, we’d like to share some results about the Frenchs’ creativity and willingness to co-create. We had 658 people responding to our survey, and respondents are representative of the French census data in terms of age and gender.

Catch these stories and more as they break on CoCreationNews.com or by following us on twitter.