Co-creation - Third Stage of Co-creation

Third Stage of Co-creation

Ramaswamy and Gouillart now advise companies on a third stage of co-creation that seeks to improve how companies operate throughout their organizations, and in all their systems and processes. This "full theory of interactions" goes beyond the existing forms of co-creation of the customer experience and co-creation of products and services. Transforming traditional corporate practices such as training, performance management, and communications into co-creative interactions, sparks innovation, cuts costs, increases employee engagement, and generates value. Examples of companies at various stages of transformation through co-creation include Nike, Nokia, IBM and Credit Agricole. Leveious Rolando, a co-creation facilitator, says traditional media such as radio and television in their heyday heralded the ability for families to come together and experience consumption as one entity. The decentralizing of technologies of entertainment and consumption from the business sites into the physical site of the body has meant new forms of configuration in design and convergence. The iPod as the descendant of the Walkman phenomenon celebrates both the body and movement while stressing the elements of individualization and personalization of content whereby the moving body can create a library of sounds and content unique to itself. Capitalist enterprises have recognized the criticism of mass reproduction leveled at the culture industries by emphasizing the remaking of individuals through technology and have stressed the personalization of technology on a mass scale. The personalization of technologies has become a major marketing tool for mobile technologies. More importantly, many mobile technologies, such as the iPod, are designed to speak to other new media technologies and constitute part of a new media ecology in which individuals can customize their content and have the agency to transgress the boundaries between a producer and consumer. So co-creation is just a natural evolution of this on-going convergence and rapid speed of personalized applications. Co-creation is seismic shift in thinking from the industrial age mind set to people engagement mindset.

Companies like InnoCentive, NineSigma, Spigit are providing the services and the platform to collaborate to innovate with people beyond the traditional four walls of the enterprise. Rolando made the point at a co-creation European conference that www.trendwatching.com words "user manufacturing" coined by Trendwatching perfectly describes symbiotic relationship developing between people and companies as result customers are becoming not only co-designers, but also manufacturers, using only the infrastructure provided by specialized companies.