Co-creating the future

Co-creation: why all the fuss?

It’s pretty clear that interest in co-creation is on the up, and that’s not just in the blogosphere and popular press, but also in ‘serious’ sources. A quick search on Google Scholar confirms the pattern: from only 23 articles citing ‘co-creation’ in the 1970s, the 1980s delivered a paltry 102, the 1990s a more substantial 658, while the first 9 and a bit years of the 21st Century has already spawned an impressive 3,660.

Much of the increase, of course, is down to the technology drivers for co-creation. Reduce the costs of communication and distribution of digital content to near zero, add a healthy dose of ‘prosumer’ technology, factor in the trend towards decentralised organisation and what you soon have is a new model of collaboration, whence the ‘co’ in co-creation. All this has been well documented in the recent deluge of popularising tomes, from Crowdsourcing to Here Comes Everybody (via We-Think and Wikinomics to name but a few).

One of the things that the increase in the buzz around co-creation has tended to do is to distract most people from asking difficult questions about the processes (the how) and outcomes (the why) of co-creation. As practitioners of co-creation, we at Promise naturally tend to believe in this way of working, but lots of people we meet are either unfamiliar with co-creation or flinch at the slightly esoteric overtones which the term has acquired through lack of clarity and overuse. We also felt it was time to explore the evidence on co-creation and re-engage in the public arena, especially given that our techniques – whose development founder Roy Langmaid has been describing this week – predate much of the recent interest.

Last Autumn, Promise commissioned LSE Enterprise to conduct a review of what the peer-reviewed journal sources have to say about co-creation (and its sister concepts). We’ve focused on articles with evaluative content and case studies. We think it’s the first time anyone’s done this in a systematic way and we’re excited about sharing our findings. While we’re still in the process of putting our report together, here’s a sneak preview.

The literature review itself threw up two related observations:

1. The wide range of contexts, interpretations and applications of co-creation in the literature. Co-creation is used to describe versions of highly focused crowdsourcing (e.g. one-off collaborative naming using a site like Kluster’s NameThis), but also large-scale, ongoing, innovation programmes that engage customers in communities of innovators or developers with powerful application in the public sector, e.g. the co-creation of health services.
2. The term co-creation is often used fairly synonymously with related ideas such as open innovation, collaborative innovation, customer-led innovation and so on. Mass customisation – such as NikeID (trainers), Threadless (t-shirts) or even customisable M&Ms. Working out which is a subset of which and identifying the ‘distinctions’ that allow us to identify the co-creative is a challenge.

The richness of interpretation of the term is, paradoxically, the very reason for its strength. Co-creation, we believe, is an emergent discipline that has found ways of bringing together the insights of therapeutic practice, psychology, management theory, innovation and action research into a new form of customer involvement.
Being an emergent discipline co-creation is not only under-defined, it’s also fraught with self-promotion and unproven claims. We think that thinking about co-creation requires a greater focus on the processes, not just outputs. Our analysis highlights the following:

1. The over-reliance on technology platforms as the means of co-creative production. Offline and hybrid techniques receive less attention and are probably underutilised.
2. The centrality of the facilitator / facilitating organisation. Skilled moderation techniques are a feature of the co-creation approach that differentiate it from, say mass customisation.
3. The importance of fostering a transitional space and ‘play’ as a constituent ingredient in the innovation / co-creation process.
4. The potential of co-creation to reduce risk and increase speed to market (for new product development) but also the impact on word-of-mouth advocacy (among participants) and, internally, the potential for co-creation to increase belief and focus.
5. A current lack of measures or frameworks for understanding success.

We’ll be publishing the findings in the next couple of months. If you want to be among the first to receive a copy when it’s ready, send us an email. Meanwhile watch this space.<–>

Tags: Co-creation, collaboration, Innovation, technology

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 27 Jan 2009 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Co-creation, Innovation, New Economy.
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