by: Matt Rhodes
Over the next few weeks I’m going to be posting some great examples of co-creation that we’ve come across and some thoughts on what makes for good co-creation: Co-creation case studies.
The real prompt for this is that we’ve been talking a lot about ‘we’ over the last few weeks. Across the team we seem to be helping quite a few client with co-creation and innovation at the moment - getting their customers to input into or lead innovations in everything from the position and marketing of a B2B telecommunications product to improving and tailoring experiences for a leisure client.
The concept of ‘we’ is one that intrigues me. There is an undoubted power to ‘I’. People like hearing personal stories and experiences, and we see in our online communities that such stories can get better reactions and greater responses. However, the power of ‘we’ is greater - people collaborating on an idea or innovation, working with each other to further improve and advance the previous thought.
Iterating and refining an idea is one of the best ways of bring in different view-points and peer reviewing the concept as it develops. We find that getting brands involved in this process can be illuminating - for the consumer, the brand and the idea. Good innovation and co-creation comes from getting people with different skills, experiences and understanding of the product or brand together. They each add something to the process and can bring their expertise and experience to the subject.
One of the best introductions to the ‘we’ experience that I’ve seen comes from Marieke Schoenmaker. The slides below are a great introduction to the subject, and the case studies at the end of the deck (including Nike+ and Zopa) are world-leading examples of the power of we.
Some more reading
Original Post: http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2008/08/co-creation-and-innovation-the-we-experience/
This blog reflects the personal opinions of individual contributors and does not represent the views of Futurelab, Futurelab's clients, or the contributors' respective employers or clients.
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Tom Humbarger says:
21 Aug 2008, 01:13
Here are two more examples of co-creation - one related to a user-generated commercial contest and the other to crowdsourcing a strategy sketch.
I wrote a blog article on my experiences with creating and managing a successful B2B user-generated commercial contest for an enterprise software company at http://tomhumbarger.wordpress.com/2008/08/18/tips-for-running-a-b2b-user....
The other example is from online community vendor Mzinga (http://www.mzinga.com) and their experiment at crowdsourcing with their community to develop a better strategy sketch. The experiment is detailed at http://www.thesocialorganization.com/2008/08/crowdsourcing-to-get-a-grea...
Tom Humbarger
http://tomhumbarger.wordpress.com/
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