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
Living outside France allows me to return to my country of birth with a foreigner’s sensitivity to quaint language developments there. The French proclivity for multisyllabic concepts is unmatched. If you can think of a concept, there’s a French word for it.
One of my favorites is primo-accédant, which refers to people who buy real estate property for the first time (not necessarily primo real estate, I might add). How many other languages have coined a term for such a person? French people also have a word for people who have multiple banking relationships, yielding the pentasyllabic multi-bancarisé. Multi-bancarisé is opposed to mono-bancarisé when they have only one bank. As for sex, however, it turns out the French prefer multiple relationships, yielding a sizable segment of primo-accédants multibancarisés for whose attention bankers fight. I am told from admittedly less than reliable sources that the new French President François Hollande was heard warming up for his victory speech at La Bastille by repeating primo-accédant multibancarisé a hundred times at fast pace more
Periodically, I ask myself: “who are the most effective change agents when it comes to implementing co-creation inside a corporation?” Here is my list, in descending order of effectiveness:
1. Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
Good news: The CFO’s source of power comes from controlling financial resources, often including IT money required for the development of co-creation platforms. They are often frustrated line managers who see co-creation as a means to gain influence over the operational side of the business.
Bad news: their analytical bias can overpower the human side of co-creation.
Good first step: issue cost reduction challenge to one of the businesses; suggest co-creation may be the way to reach that goal (get external people to do work for free that was previously done inside).
2. Chief Information Officer (CIO)
Good news: CIOs get to co-creation through the funding of engagement platforms. The role of CIO in co-creation is legitimized by the app store phenomenon (co-creation with third-party developers).
Bad news: CIOs often struggle with developing the human community part of co-creation (they can be too tool-focused).
Good first step: find a few APIs and open up some aspect of your customer-facing sites to third-party developers. Start connecting customers and developers.
It has been widely reported in the last few days that some players on the New Orleans Saints football team developed a home-grown bounty system whereby players would reward each other with personal money for inflicting injuries onto opposing players. While the National Football League is investigating the New Orleans Saints specifically, there are indications that such a system might be in existence across the league, along a continuum from the clearly legal (players rewarding a punt return) to the apparently illegal variety (the NFL seems to have rules that prohibit intentionally putting a quarterback on a stretcher).
I work with a lot of analytically-minded people. These people can be colleagues or client, often both. Because analytically-minded firms tend to hire analytical consultants, they often lock in a powerful embrace that makes it hard for either of them to view the world through the lens of co-creation. These are the workshops from hell. Their first objection is often that co-creation feels like a random process of human discovery void of any data. Real men don’t do co-creation, they say. They formulate a hypothesis, gather some analytical data through research that proves the hypothesis is right, may test the idea with some customers or other relevant stakeholders, and then go build whatever needs to be built, be it a product, a process, or a strategy. Data drives the hypothesis, and humans are there to validate the hypothesis.
Co-creation follows a different logic. In co-creation, the hypothesis is the result of the engagement process, and insights are in fact generated jointly by the company and the people it engages (this is the uncomfortable part, the “letting go” part). What is even harder for analytical people to see is that co-creation is equally data-driven as the more traditional company-centric process, product or strategy design, but the data is of a different nature because it comes from the people themselves. more
She’s young. She’s passionate. She’s an environmentalist. Her ecological ideas feel a bit out of place in the conservative bank where she works, but she doesn’t care. That’s her passion. Every Thursday night, she goes to the local movie theater to participate in the meetings of the sustainability group she’s part of. She wants to change the world, just from where she is.
She’s also a triathlete. She can swim, run and bike faster than anyone around her. She shrugs her shoulders when the conversation moves to the local soccer team and the thousands of people they attract every week. “Have you ever attended a track and field meeting she asks us?” None of us has. She describes the excitement of having so many things going on in the stadium at any one time: watch a race, then focus on a pole-vaulter clearing the bar or watch a javelin fly across the field. I feel like signing up.more
I have a new teaching aid for co-creation: the HBO documentary by Cameron Crowe showing how Elton John and Leon Russell came together to produce a new CD called The Union (this is also the name of the documentary). On the analytical side, it shows how two people coming together initiated the development of a global community of fans (the record opened up at number 1 on Amazon in 2010 and rose to number 3 on the Billboard charts). On the experiential side, the story provides a window on the beautiful mind of Elton John and bears witness to the second birth of Leon Russell (“I was in a ditch and he treated me like a king”). The words of Elton John describing the transformative power of the experience on himself offer a better motivation for co-creation than any of us “experts” will ever provide.
The documentary starts with Elton John in a middle-aged funk, wondering how to avoid having to record a Christmas album for his label. He suddenly remembers the early influence on his piano playing of the American song writer and performer Leon Russell, once a pioneering rock star in the late 60s-early 70s, now a marginal musician in Nashville, Tennessee. He approaches Russell, a grouchy, tired 67 year old with this unlikely proposition: “Let’s make a record together, full 50-50 partnership, I’m renting a studio, let’s get on with it, what do you say?”
It’s a rude awakening. I have arrived in Saint-Etienne, France, where the temperature has dropped down to 10 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to 85 degrees earlier that morning in Mumbai. A cold suburban train from the Paris airport to Gare de Lyon and a TGV train down to Saint-Etienne, watching the snow-covered French landscape at high speed. I’m here for a workshop with a French bank, hoping to activate an economic community among the small business customers of the bank.
The temperature drop outside is huge, but the one in the room is even greater. Participants in the workshop are reluctant, to say the least. They simply don’t see the point of building a customer community. Yes, they care about Saint-Etienne, the 400,000 inhabitants city where they live, and a former mining town which struggles to find its next economic source of growth. But no, they do not see any role for their bank in activating the local economy beyond what the bank already does, i.e., gather savings and make loans to local businesses. “This is for the government to do”, one of the participants tells me in the uniquely dismissive style of my compatriots. This has to be the toughest workshop I’ve done in five years. more
When the dark days of winter get to me, I head for Mumbai. The business junkie I am does not need sun – although you also get that in Mumbai in January – but economic excitement. So here I am once again, arriving exhausted at midnight at the airport. My driver is not here and conversation with the hotel operator produces a strange mix of reassurance that the driver is already there and disturbing evidence that they may not have scheduled him after all. Unfathomable India. At the airport, I try to recruit the other drivers of competing hotels to help me locate my guy – building communities is after all what I have come here to teach – but instead, I get multiple offers to spend the night at other hotels or to drive me to my original hotel at what seems to be an exponentially decreasing cost. One hour later, the driver shows up, vaguely apologetic, making laconic references to a parking problem. I will never know what happened.
I have come to organize a preparatory workshop with a large European crop protection company wanting to develop a new partnership with a larger Indian trader. The idea is to get organized internally first, then propose a co-creation workshop to the partner at a subsequent time. The exciting part is that both parties are already poster children for co-creation, having each set up successful farmer communities of their own, which they now propose to connect. I have slept very little – adapting to a 10.5 hours time difference is never easy– and yet I feel totally “on” because workshop participants are so excited that all I have to do is feed off their enthusiasm. By the afternoon of the first day, the account manager for the trading company picks up the phone and calls someone at the trader to let them know we want to engage in co-creation with them. By the afternoon of the second day, we have a call organized between the two parties involving senior leadership on both sides. Yes, they agree, this makes a lot of sense, maybe a bit more of this hypothesis and a bit less of that one. We’re off to the races. more
Enough already! In their recent editions, both Newsweek and Bloomberg Businessweek are vilifying Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, for failing to solve the Euro crisis problem. TheNewsweek article describes her in particularly unflattering terms, with not-so-subtle Aryan references (“the lady prefers blonds”), a Germanic over-preoccupation with rules and discipline, and an ill-advised focus on inflation rooted in the history of the Weimarer Republik. Bloomberg Businessweek’s article avoids WWII imagery, but similarly describes her as a cold-hearted incompetent leader, hopelessly stuck in a German paradigm of austerity and unable to grasp the new global economic realities.
I have been puzzled by this concentrated journalistic fire on the German chancellor in recent weeks. Why target her, when the euro crisis clearly did not originate with Germany, and when most country leaders are struggling with their response to the new economic challenge? At this stage, everybody is groping in the dark for a viable economic framework (the division of the US leaders on the virtues of tax reduction vs. stimulus spending constitutes exhibit A), so why zero in on Angela Merkel as particularly incompetent in this crowd of fumbling country leaders? more
I became interested in economic affairs by listening to my father’s speculation about where commercial trucks driving up our street in Eastern France came from. As a German teacher in the local public high school, his own finances were protected from any competitiveness consideration, yet he instinctively understood the power of business in creating local wealth for the community. He also taught at a local textile institute and learned through conversations with his students how tough it was for local plants to compete against rising Asian factories. Although the value system at our household was mostly academic – you were either a “good student” or you were not – he marveled at how a few of his “average” students had become local entrepreneurs and created jobs around our home town. He often quoted the example of a local industrial baker who, while not an A student in his German class, had grown to hire hundreds of local people, eventually providing a strong career to one of his sons-in-law. “My job is to help my students export by teaching them German”, he would say. This was the first public-private partnership of my young economic life.
When I hear how confused we have become about what makes an economy tick, I revert back to my belief in “it’s the local economy, stupid”. By now, we’ve all learned that jobs are created by small businesses, who are by definition local. Economic wealth is generated when a few entrepreneurs find local financing to hire qualified local workers trained at local schools, thereby generating income that can be spent in local shops and invested in local houses, thereby allowing local politicians to be popular and get reelected. The process of co-creation through which these people work with each other – the entrepreneurs, the employees, the bankers, the customers, the service providers, the politicians – is a lot more important than the economic policy set by a central government anywhere. Sadly, this is not how economists think, as they arrogantly keep searching for the next policy paradigm. More
"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.
Download a free copy courtesy of our strategic partner, PRTM management consultants (registration required).
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.
