Co-creation - Early Applications of Co-creation

Early Applications of Co-creation

The introduction of enterprise social software may have functioned as an enabler of this change in how companies evolve to business networks, and how both large and small companies cooperate. But Prahalad and Ramaswamy stated in their published work, as other practitioners have affirmed, that co-creation is about far more than customers co-designing products and services.

Co-creation is at the heart of the open-source-software movement, where users have full access to the source code and are empowered to make their own changes and improvements to it.

Co-creation can be thought to have its roots in the work of Herstatt and Von Hippel at Hilti, where they worked with "lead users" on innovative products.

In the early 2000s, consultants and companies deployed co-creation as a tool for engaging customers in product design. Examples include Nike giving customers online tools to design their own sneakers. At a MacWorld conference in 2007, Sam Lucente, the legendary design and innovation guru at Hewlett-Packard, described his epiphany that designers can no longer design products alone, using their brilliance and magic. They are no longer in the business of product and service design, he stated; they are really in the business of customer co-creation.

During the mid-2000s, co-creation became a driving concept in social media and marketing techniques, where companies such as Converse persuaded large numbers of its most passionate customers to create their own video advertisements for the product. The Web 2.0 phenomenon encompassed many forms of co-creation marketing, as social and consumer communities became "ambassadors", "buzz agents", "smart mobs", and "participants" transforming the product experience.