Experience co-creation (ECC) is a major re-think on how businesses create value. It involves redefining the way organizations engage individuals in value creation, especially employees and internal stakeholders, but also customers, suppliers, and related external stakeholders and communities. It is about organizations unleashing the creative energy of people by inviting and enabling them to interact with them differently.More
The Experience Co-Creation Partnership provides workshops, executive education and consulting services to disseminate experience co-creation concepts and support their practitioners. We are committed to the global application of ECC practice and travel extensively all over the world. Typical engagements with companies start with an introductory workshop and evolve into a combination of cascading workshops, coaching and consulting interventions. Our primary role is to coach members of the organization in the application of the experience co-creation concepts and help companies migrate to the next practices of value creation. More
Once upon a time, a scientist and a nurse decided to tackle sepsis, the hospital-acquired infection that often results in death for hospital patients.
The scientist reviewed the existing scientific literature on the topic, consulted with world-class experts on the problem, and concluded that what the issue needed was a $100MM grant proposal to build a genetic data base of all sepsis patients. He went to the National Institutes for Health and talked its management into endorsing his study. He recruited three leading pharmaceutical and medical equipment powerhouses to fund the proposal. The Obama administration financed the rest of the effort and the scientist became a poster child for government-funded research, next to clean energy and electronic health records. He launched a peer-reviewed, double-blind, 20 year longitudinal effort to identify the genetic markers that put patients at risk of developing sepsis. “It is time to eradicate this killer off the face of the earth”, he told the New York Times. more
Working with a good editor involves a disturbing intimacy. The ostensibly professional relationship unavoidably grows into an invasive friendship when the editor gets inside your head. While massively grateful for the creation of order out of their synaptic chaos, most authors I know feel violated when someone rummages inside their head in this fashion (my wife expresses similar feelings when a cleaning crew shows up at our door).
I‘ve been working with the same Harvard Business Review editor for close to thirty years now (Steve Prokesch, senior editor), and we just completed our third article* together. While an article every ten years does not exactly make me into Balzac (or Peter Drucker, for that matter), our relationship has gone through the same cycle every time, something I await, dread and ultimately love. I‘ve found there are editing seasons, each with a distinct experience of the interaction with him. Only upon completion of the full seasonal cycle does the beauty of our co-creation reveal itself.more
* Note: article link to full text is currently being provided, compliments of HBR
I will always remember an old professor colleague of mine. I had not seen him in twenty years. He was the last person coming off the plane in Boston at midnight and looked quite old. He was disheveled, slowly dragging his oversized suitcase up the jet way, holding a half-open shoulder bag full of flip charts. He was still wearing the same patched-at-the-elbows rumpled suit, and his shirt was stained by markers ink. He saw me waiting for him, and a large smile illuminated his face.
“I’m just back from the West Coast”, he shouted at me from twenty feet away. “Three-day-workshop with a bunch of kids managing a high-tech start-up. Not so bad for a ninety-year old guy who does not even use Facebook”.
I always wanted to be a tour guide and last week, I got my chance. As a favor to a group of French retailers visiting the US, I took them on a tour of Wegmans, WalMart and Costco. Not too many international visitors pile up on a bus to visit New Jersey in mid-January, but we did. I had set it up as a Compare and Contrast exercise – teachers can’t ever organize anything without some pedagogical purpose– but one of my visitors suggested the trip should have an entertainment theme instead. “Like in Club Med” he suggested. We toyed with a Soprano or Bruce Springsteen motif, but agreed the trip should be called The Good, the Bad and the Efficient (sorry, WalMart!).
At Wegmans, the quality of the food display earned great respect from my French colleagues, although I sensed some contempt for a culture that would deem food so unimportant as to be consumed inside a grocery store. When I suggested we should have lunch at Wegmans’ restaurant upstairs, I was told we needed “a proper place” instead. That place turned out to be the Bahama Breeze in Woodside, New Jersey. I learned this choice had resulted from a close call with the Olive Garden next door. We went for the not-so-tropical hamburger and fries, which everybody ate with exquisite fork-and-knife manners.more
Lately, Malden, Massachusetts has entered my consciousness. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because a few of my Yelp friends from Boston have told me this is the “in” place for Ethiopian, Sri Lankan or Moroccan food. Maybe it’s because Business Week has made noise about Malden being a great place for kids to grow because of its diversity. Maybe it’s because a member of my family has some political responsibilities there? Or perhaps I’m just tired or organizing business communities in India, Latin America and Europe and want to come home in the evening?
I don’t yet know how to fit all the pieces in the co-creation puzzle, but I’m eager to figure it out. My typical gig involves finding a central business player eager to orchestrate the development of a mini-economy around itself: a large business, a bank, sometimes a public entity (although a profit-seeking business with a community bent provides the best anchor). more
It is a bad outcome when the main lesson learned from the recent US Presidential election is that future political leaders will win through a better understanding of demographic segmentation. The conventional wisdom emerging from the recent victory of Barack Obama is that Republicans lost because they failed to understand that the United States is becoming more diverse, and consequently over-relied on older, white votes. Conversely, Democrats are deemed to have won the Presidency and gained seats in the Senate by energizing the vote of Latinos, African Americans, women and younger voters.
The problem with this argument is that it represents a static view of the situation (yes, the numbers are as advertised in the re-election of President Obama), but fails to recognize the dynamic role of political innovation in electoral success (no, there wasn’t any of that in the recent election). Like in business, political innovation does not reside in the ability to activate one’s traditional segment by honing in messages specifically crafted for them (the proverbial “red meat” for the equally proverbial “base”), but in rearranging the segments and building new creative coalitions among them. MORE
I’ve been a private sector guy all my life. I like singing for my supper. I like fighting on any consulting proposal, executive education gig, or speaking platform. I consider myself a front-line warrior in an economic war, and I like the thrill of victory and (in moderate doses) the agony of defeat. I have created employment for others (with some inevitable ups and downs), brought back currency to the countries that have been my home, and have traditionally thought of myself as an entrepreneurial type that makes an economic contribution to society without expecting much social credit for it. Most of my fellow citizens seem to believe the wealth generated by entrepreneurial success should be my sole reward, and that’s OK with me. With most of my family members in France as civil servants of one kind or other – many teachers among them – I have run at a young age as far away from government employment as I could, even moving to America to be at the frontier of creative capitalism and avoid any public temptation.
Last night, I found myself watching the PBS documentary entitled Half The Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Hosted by the two journalists Nicolas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (his wife), and patterned after their book by the same name, it took me on a roller-coaster from utter despair (when a fourteen year old Sierra Leone rape victim gets expelled from her home for confronting her predator) to powerful hope (learning how innovative some of the militant women are who help young girls or women victims fight and survive).
Unlike Kristof and WuDunn, I am not in a position to write about women oppression of the physical kind (rape, mutilation, sexual slavery), but I do witness quieter cases of women’s moral oppression in global business every day.
I’m talking about you, anonymous Yemeni woman in my Dubai class of the London Business School last year. As often in the Arab world, I was instructed not to address you first. For three hours, you patiently listened to my challenging your male Middle-Eastern colleagues without engaging, eyes mostly down on your notes. In the last fifteen minutes, you found the courage to raise your hand and suggested a brilliant application for your bank of what I was trying to teach. I can still remember your dark eyes, glittering with the excitement of a new thought. I would have liked to put you on stage and have you teach the next class with me. But I didn’t, because this is no place of a Yemeni woman.
It is midnight in Mumbai and my cab driver knows two English words. He points to the huge traffic jam around the hotel caused by the festival and says: “shortcut”. I nod my head appreciatively, hoping he can get me to make my 3 am flight back to the US. As we dodge crowds of young children wandering in the shanties, he utters his second word: “tip”. Raised eyebrows tell me we’re now negotiating. For 20%, he gets me to the airport in less than an hour and I make my flight comfortably. This “tip for shortcut” value proposition is as concise as they come. Cabbies are the best small business owners.
It’s the second half of July in Paris. Traffic is slow, a surprise given that many French people are already on vacation. The problem is painters and plumbers, my Rumanian-born cab driver tells me. “They want to go on vacation in August, and in order to generate cash, they start three or four jobs they will finish in the fall, which allows them to collect multiple down-payments before leaving.” As we’re bobbing and weaving through traffic, he points to numerous double-parked vans clogging traffic. Cabbies are the best traffic analysts.
Do the children of NBC Olympic executives watch the delayed broadcasts at 8 pm?
Have executives at the soon-to-be bankrupt Best Buy ever visited an Apple store?
What would it take for my main course at Not Your Average Joe’s restaurant to not arrive on the first bite of my appetizer?
What would it take for Skype to stop moving the “end of call” red phone on my screen so that I can cleanly conclude conversations with my mother (who never hangs up before I do)?
Why is the freezer compartment on my GE refrigerator designed to break my back and why is it separated into bins that do not match the size of any commercially available food package?
How can I get my GE washing machine to stop beeping at me when I load clothes into it?
Why hasn’t any major oil company come up with a comfortable tire inflator at their gas stations (I often go to ExxonMobil)?
Could Microsoft and Dell tell me when my Caps Lock is on?
Why do small TVs automatically have a bad sound (mine is a Toshiba)?
Why do I receive two or three credit card offers from Capitol One every week, but my Bank of America small business banker never calls me?
Community-Powered Problem SolvingHarvard Business Review, by Francis Gouillart and Douglas Billings, April 2013This Harvard Business Review article illustrates how a large brick-and-mortar healthcare business was able to change the rules of its industry. (This link is currently being provided by HBR for sharing the full text of the article for complimentary viewing)
links to a Harvard Business Review (HBR) blog by Francis Gouillart.
Co-Creation Stories is a three-part video series showing Francis Gouillart presenting the principles and case studies on co-creation.
The Power of Co-Creation by Venkat Ramaswamy and Francis Gouillart (Simon & Schuster Free Press, October 2010)
This major business book presents co-creation as the new re-engineering. The book provides a framework for managers and case studies on how leading businesses are using co-creation platforms to supercharge marketing, sales, R&D, product development and management. Management guru Tom Peters said about the book (via Twitter): "'BREATHTAKING' ALERT: I guarantee 'The Power of Co-Creation' will be talked about for years to come! INCREDIBLE (quantity/quality) EXAMPLES."
This companion article to The Power of Co-Creation demonstrates how co-creation puts the human experience at the center of the enterprise's design. The authors highlight important implications for strategy formulation, business process redesign, and value creation. ).
ARDA World 2013, Annual Convention April 7-11, 2013 Hollwood, Florida. Westin Diplomat Resort and Spa. Francis will be speaking on opportunites for using co-creation to innovate.
ARDA Conference November 15, 2012 Washington. DC – Francis Gouillart spoke on co-creating in marketing and sales within the resorts industry.
PDMA Product Innovation ConferenceOctober 22, 2012 Orlando, FL. – Francis Gouillart and Doug Billings from PwC ran an innovation lab on co-creation
SAMA UniversityOctober 24/25, 2012 Chicago, IL. – Francis Gouillart and Doug Billings from PwC spoke on co-creation in the B2B environment.
12th International Management Congress, July 5, Porto Alegre, Brazil – Francis Gouillart gave a keynote speech titled "Co-creating sustainable relationships with stakeholders"
HSM World Business Forum 2011, June 27-28, Buenos Aires – Francis Gouillart gave a keynote speech on co-creation at this leading business conference in Argentina
PDMA Conference on Social Product Development and Co-Creation, June 27-28, Phoenix – Prof. Venkat Ramaswamy, co-author of The Power of Co-Creation, was a keynote speaker at this conference chaired by our strategic partner, PRTM management consultants
Enterprise Co-Creation Executive Breakfast, June 10, Copenhagen – Francis Gouillart and our strategic partner, PRTM management consultants, presented the principles of co-creation in action
Enterprise Co-Creation Executive Breakfast, June 7, Paris –Francis Gouillart and clients from La Poste and Credit Agricole spoke on "business innovation and transformation through co-creation"
Japanese Book Launch Event, May 27, Tokyo – PRTM management consultants, our strategic partner, hosted the launch event for this fifth edition of The Power of Co-Creation, published by Tokuma Shoten
Management Circle Strategic Dialogue 2011, May 19, Frankfurt– Francis Gouillart and Prof. Robert S. Kaplan spoke on "new approaches to strategy formulation and implementation"
Front End of Innovation 2011, May 16-18, Boston – Francis Gouillart gave a keynote speech and led a special conference segment on Experience-Driven Innovation
Local Motors is one of our favorite companies because of its totally co-created business model – from design to operations to production of cars. It's an approach that could literally redefine manufacturing. So it was great to spend a day at the Local Motors micro-factory in Phoenix for the PDMA Conference on Social Product Development and Co-Creation on June 27 and 28.
One of the most interesting talks at #CoCreatePDMA was by Ben Kaufman, CEO/founder of Quirky, another company modeled on co-creation. In his short presentation, we learned a lot about the importance of good ideas, the principle of transparency, and the power of passion. Quirky serves as midwife to inventors, bringing two new consumer products to market each week. One of the latest is the Pivot Power stripthat fits large adapters in every outlet. We were pleased to bring home Kaufman's demo model from Phoenix. It's a really cool why-didn't-someone-think-of-that-before product (below).
Co-Creation Trends Report
Power to the Patient: Seven Co-Creation Trends in Healthcare
Healthcare reform is always in the news, and never more so today. In fact, many websites have appeared in recent years that make healthcare information more transparent, create dialogue between practitioners and patients (and even among patients), improve access, and reduce the risk of a bad transaction. Collectively, these websites shift both control of and responsibility for healthcare from the experts to the consumer.
This co-creation report details seven trends that tip power toward the patient.
