The Power of Co-Creation

Following Vijesh Unnikrishnan’s post, does a firm have to do more than just collaborate with external parties for its product innovation to be considered co-creative? The answer is “Yes” – we discuss this more fully in chapter 3 of The Power of Co-Creation on Innovation Co-Creation. Briefly, while popular approaches to opening up innovation, such as crowdsourcing and mass collaboration, aim to tap into talent outside the enterprise to widen the competence base of innovation and bring new perspectives into the innovation process, they often miss a key ingredient: the need to build a compelling engagement experience of collaborative innovation with participants. Crowdsourcing and mass collaboration do indeed involve the building of platforms to engage with external constituencies. Where they fall short, however, is in incorporating the participants’ experiences of interactions on these platforms, and their experiences of enterprise offerings and processes. We have repeatedly found this step to be a hurdle for companies engaging in open innovation, leading to partial or failed attempts. The solution lies in continuously generating insights from the engagement experiences of all participants, and then building the open innovation process with them in a mutually valuable manner. This requires dialogic, transparent, accessible, and reflexive interactions to make the process of open innovation more co-creative. Such innovation co-creation also addresses the challenge of opening up innovation in large, established organizations, by recognizing the experiences of people and talent inside the enterprise as much as those of outsiders. See illustrative examples in the book such as Wacoal (Japan) and Orange Telecom (France).