As customers become more informed, connected
and active, with the ability and motivation
to take control of their interactions with companies,
these companies must escape traditional
approaches of delivering products and services
that are based on a firm-centric view of value
creation. Experience co-creation breaks down the process through which customers create their own interactions with companies. It offers a practical starting point for tapping into the
new sources of competitive advantage
and
changing the rules of the game. This reconceptual-ization of the interaction process leads companies to new insights on how to redesign their customer contacts, thereby leading to an innovation process in touch with customer needs. 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
Francis Gouillart's blog on co-creation
January 29, 2009
In praise of average performers
It dawned on me this morning that they’re all gone. Someone must have come for them in the middle of the night, but they’re no longer there. The nice old-fashioned executive assistant who gave you hell when you asked to see her boss, then became downright maternal if you groveled a bit. Gone. The middle manager who complained about being overworked, yet came in at 9 am and left at 5:30 pm on the dot to catch his train, but somehow found the time to organize the March Madness pool and keep the books for the department. Also gone. And then there was the kid. She wasn’t quite sure why she worked there, but it paid the rent and they all thought she’d one day get excited about some business thing and go somewhere. Also gone.
 American businesses have stopped growing because all the people have gone. The modern-day American enterprise is like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon: everybody in it is above average. We’ve become so good at weeding out middle- and low-performers that only the best have survived. As a result, US businesses are highly productive. But there’s no backfill for these high-performers. They’re so darn busy they can’t take on anything remotely growth-oriented. They have a job to do. And although they’re financially rewarded, most of them are miserable, crumbling under the demand for their time on task forces for development projects. More
January 9, 2009
Crimes of the blog
I’m going through a mind-splitting experience. In the day time, I write a book -- The Alchemy of Co-Creation, with my friend and colleague Venkat Ramaswamy, for Simon & Schuster Free Press. At night, I write this blog. Every time I switch from one to the other, I have to remind myself whether I’m Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde.
For book writing purposes, I offer my best incarnation of the thoughtful middle child who plays inside a gang of my co-author, the publisher’s editor, our literary agent/coach and our in-house editor. We plot our crimes long in advance and in systematic fashion, carefully balancing conceptual integrity and consumer appeal. We endlessly rewrite the plan in minute details, complete with fact-checks and footnotes. Some of the crimes we describe will be three years in the making by the time they take place and our book describing them gets published in October 2010. I sometimes wonder whether our forensics will still be fresh at the time. More
December 30, 2009
A product design poet among engineers
Being in the co-creation business, I’m often confronted with product design issues. This draws me into the world of software tools used to support the work of engineers designing those products. This industry was originally known as Computer-Aided Design (CAD), was later renamed CAD/CAM (Computer-Aided Manufacturing), and is now called Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), to reflect the fact that products increasingly need to be designed not only for manufacturing and testing but also for maintenance, servicing and disposal.
PLM is a left-brained world, to put it mildly. It is a steely blue industry where 3D charts twirl on computer screens, engineers exchange schematic designs and blinking tables of data, and tensile strength and mean-time-between failure drive the choice of material. No room for soft emotional types here. PLM software development has largely been driven by the automotive and aerospace industries, neither of which represents a benchmark for customer sensitivity, as most travelers can attest daily. Installing these software packages requires massive systems integration efforts, which are delivered by IT consulting firms and supervised by corporate IT staffs, themselves hardly populated by marketing hippies searching for new consumer experiences.
In the midst of this free-for-all of engineering features, the CEO of the French company Dassault Systemes, a person by the name of Bernard Charlès, is attempting to take his company to a different place. (In the interest of transparency, let me mention that I met Charlès once about three years ago, but do not otherwise have any relationship with him or Dassault Systemes. I just happen to like what he stands for.) Simply put, Charlès wants his software to enable the co-creation of the customer experience by bringing together user communities and engineers. He wants design to be done in real time, with users leading the charge. It is a poet’s vision in a math-based world, a rhomboid among the squares of the industry. The idea is to let customers visualize their experience through the software and allow engineers to engage in a direct dialogue with them, based on the simulated experience offered. More
See all posts |
| |
|
|
Co-Creation Trends Report:
Online Healthcare
Power to the Patient: Seven Co-Creation
Trends in Online 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.
1. Drinking from the health information
fire hose
In the not-too-distant past, specialized
knowledge about healthcare and medicine
was limited largely to specialists. Today,
however, anyone can quickly find massive
amounts of medical information online at no
cost. Hospitals, doctors, insurers, govern-
ment agencies, for-profit companies,
and private individuals all maintain
healthcare websites. A website informa-
tion company lists over 59,000 websites
on health. Of the top 10, four are published
by the federal government (the National
Institutes of Health and the Centers for
Disease Control), two are from a private
medical information company (WebMD), two
are portals drawing
from multiple sources
(Yahoo Health and Drugs.com),
one is from a
pharmacy (Walgreens), and one is
from a
healthcare practice (the Mayo Clinic).
Frankly, the challenge for non-experts today
is to
wade through the thousands of Web
pages and
separate the useful information
from the
irrelevant.
To take one example, WebMD.com draws 17
million visitors per month, on average. Part
of its appeal lies in the way the free site
sorts health information in many different
ways; WebMD.com is particularly known for
its in-depth A-to-Z guides on diseases,
symptoms, medications, and other topics.
Site visitors can use a Symptom Checker to
investigate their own possible medical
conditions, and from there are guided to
information on over 30,000 pharmaceuticals.
More
Selected publications
"Are You Ready for the Co-Creation Movement? by Venkat Ramaswamy, IESE Insight, third quarter 2009
This article in the journal of IESE Business School (Spain) chronicles the growth of the co-creation movement and shows why it is poised for even greater expansion.
"Co-Creating Strategic Risk-Return Management" by Mark L. Frigo and Venkat Ramaswamy, Strategic Finance, May 2009
This cover story in the magazine of the Institute of Management Accountants applies co-creation to the management of risks and returns.
"Leading the transformation of co-creation to value" by Venkat Ramaswamy, Strategy & Leadership, March/April 2009
The co-creation model applied with employees and human resources.
"Co-creating value through customers' experiences: the Nike case" by Venkat Ramaswamy, Strategy & Leadership, Sept./Oct. 2008
A case study of co-creation in consumer goods.
"Co-Creating Strategy with Experience Co-Creation" by Venkat
Ramaswamy and Francis Gouillart, Balanced Scorecard Report, Jul-Aug. 2008
Three principles of the experience co-creation (ECC) paradigm of strategy innovation.
 The
Future of Competition by C.K. Prahalad and Venkat
Ramaswamy (Harvard Business School Press, 2004) Winner of the
2004 MIT Sloan Management Review/Pricewater- houseCoopers Award,
a BusinessWeek "Top
10 Book of the Year 2004" and one of Strategy+Business magazine's
"Best
Business Books 2004: Strategy."
Upcoming and recent events
University of Michigan Ross School of Business, April 19–20, 2010, Ann Arbor, Michigan – Venkat Ramaswamy and Francis Gouillart will lead a two-day executive education program on "Co-Creating Your Company's Future with Your Customers, Employees, and Stakeholders."
HSM Expo Management 2009, Nov. 30 – Dec. 2, Sao Paulo – Venkat Ramaswamy will join business and thought leaders including Jack Welch, Carly Fiorina, Michael Porter, and Paul Krugman as a keynote presenter to deliver "Co-Creating the Future."
HSM Expo Management 2009, Nov. 18–19, Mexico City – Venkat Ramaswamy will join business and thought leaders including Gary Hamel, Muhammad Yunus, Thomas Frey, and Jack Welch as a keynote presenter to deliver "Co-Creating the Future."
More
|
