Successful business cases of co-creation in action

There are very famous and well known cases that helped the co-creation discipline to become famous. I distinguish in examples where co-creation has been used to boost regular businesses and others where co-creation is at the centre of the business model. On the first type, among the most known are the following:

·         “My Starbucks Idea”. It was set up for customers to exchange ideas with each other and directly with Starbucks. Customers give opinions on everything such as products, services, layout, advertising, corporate social responsibility, in store music, and so on. They feature and reword the most active users and implement a good numbers of ideas received. Some numbers: more than 93k ideas shared, more than 1,3million users and 5,5milion pages view per month.

·         “Dell Ideastorm”. Dell went on to setup a number of customer feedback environments from Ideastorm, Studio Dell and Direct to Dell where they asked users to submits new ideas and issues openly, discuss them with one other and their employees. This made Dell to turnaround the bad reputation reached in those years where 45% of the posts regarding Dell where negative in an opposite situation with 5.3k customers issues were solved and an average of 3.5millions visits per month.

·         “Nike ID Studio”. It allows customers design their own Nike trainer and buy or just share it with their friends across social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. The online service was launched in 1999 and gave the ability to choose from a limited range of different materials and colours to develop their own style of tennis shoe. Today there is a choice of more than 30 trainers models, more than 80 different material option type. The success of the initiative is testified by the 3 millions unique users going on the site every month.

Why combining co-creation and collective intelligence?

It is a common trend to be in favour of open innovation and co-creation. We have all heard about the wisdom of crowds, bringing the outside in, and we all believe in "none of us is as smart as all of us”. Collective wisdom considers “multiple opinions and forms of intelligence. Wisdom in groups is demonstrated by insight, good sense, clarity, objectivity, and discernment rooted in deep caring and compassion”. We connect on political, social, and economic strategies and understand psychological, spiritual and cultural roots.

Co-creating and collective intelligence/wisdom are forming a hybrid forces, a calling to reclaim the participation of people in groups as positive, useful, healing, life affirming. We alter the way that we see the world in order to solve problems together.

It is a fact that humans today love to participate in problem-solving online, to have a voice and to express themselves, to be a part of the story-telling of new media, and to be a part of the collective intelligence process. The cultural, economic and political changes brought on by online intelligence sharing, via different media, have been truly amazing and reflect extraordinary cultural shifts in the 21st century. There is a huge opportunity out of there, people feel right to collaborate to solve higher issues, higher order of problems or matters.  

Enabling is one thing, participating quite another. Mass dialogue just does not simply happen. There are many reasons why people feel restrained to freely engage and exchange ideas. Tech by itself will not overcome these obstacles. Captivating your audience requires purpose, encouragement and reciprocity. We need to create a context for mass dialogue and co-creation, unleashing the tacit knowledge and passion of people around brands, products and organizations.

What is co-creation?

Co-creation is a business philosophy  and strategy aimed at putting the customer at the heart of the company, mainly in the product development. Specifically, companies behind the co-creation emphasize the generation and ongoing realization of mutual firm-customer value. Co-creation allows and encourages a more active involvement from the customer to create a value rich experience. The co-creation is a powerful approach to reduce  the gap between companies and customers. The customers are seen as a key resource of knowledge that goes much beyond the normal customer researches, as they provide ideas, suggestions on how to improve products/services or to generate the development of them.

Co-created value arises in the form of personalized, unique experiences for the customer (value-in-use) and ongoing revenue, learning and enhanced market performance drivers for the firm (loyalty, relationships, customer word of mouth). Value is co-created with customers if and when a customer is able to personalize his/her experience using a firm's product-service proposition – in the lifetime of its use – to a level that is best suited to get his/her job(s) or tasks done and which allows the firm to derive greater value from its product-service investment in the form of new knowledge, higher revenues/profitability and/or superior brand value/loyalty.

Co-creation is a powerful trend in product development that has been around for quite some time, but has recently started to gain traction.  Scholars C K Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy introduced the concept in their 2000 Harvard Business Review article, “Co-Opting Customer Competence”.  Value will be increasingly co-created by the firm and the customer, they argued, rather than being created entirely inside the firm. Co-creation in their view not only describes a trend of jointly creating products. It also describes a movement away from customers buying products and services as transactions, to those purchases being made as part of an experience. The authors held that consumers seek freedom of choice to interact with the firm through a range of experiences. Customers want to define choices in a manner that reflects their view of value, and they want to interact and transact in their preferred language and style.