The Power of Co-Creation

Book excerpt: Apple embraced co-creation to enhance the speed and scope of its innovation, generat­ing over $1 billion for its App-Store partner-developers in two years, even as it overtook Microsoft in market value. Starbucks launched its online platform MyStarbucksIdea.com to tap into ideas from customers and turbocharged a turnaround. Unilever turned to co-creation for redesigning prod­uct lines such as Sunsilk shampoo and revitalized growth. Nike achieved remarkable success with its Nike+ co-creation initiative, which enables a com­munity of over a million runners to interact with one another and the company, increasing its market share by 10 percent in the first year. Co-creation involves redefining the way organizations engage individuals—customers, employees, suppliers, partners, and other stake­holders—bringing them into the process of value creation and engaging them in enriched experi­ences, in order to —formulate new breakthrough strategies —design compelling new products and services —transform management processes —lower risks and costs —increase market share, loyalty, and returns In this pathbreaking book, Venkat Ramaswamy (who coined the term co-creation with C. K. Prahalad) and Francis Gouillart, pioneers in working with com­panies to develop co-creation practices, show how every organization—from large corporation to small firm, and government agency to not-for-profit—can achieve “win more–win more” results with these methods. Based on extraordinary research and the authors’ hands-on experiences with successful projects in co-creation at dozens of the world’s most exciting organizations, The Power of Co-Creation illustrates with detailed examples from leading firms such as those above, as well as from Cisco, GlaxoSmithKline, Ama­zon, Jabil, Predica, Wacoal, Caja Navarra, and many others, how enterprises have used a wide range of “engagement platforms”—and how they have even restructured internal management processes—in order to harness the power of co-creation. As the authors’ wealth of examples make vividly clear, enterprises can no longer afford to view custom­ers and other stakeholders as passive recipients of their products and services but must learn to engage them in defining and delivering enhanced value. Co-creation goes beyond the conventional “process view” of qual­ity, re-engineering, and lean thinking, and is the essential new mind-set and practice for boosting sus­tainable growth, productivity, and profits in the future.