Power Play

Co-creation power

at a glance

• Co-creation is working with other people to build a shared future, a future that represents a win for everyone.
• Co-creation starts with a specific purpose that you cannot solve on your own. It operates in the sweet spot between control and chaos and draws on the wisdom of crowds, including multiple stakeholders such as customers or employees.
• Co-creation recognises a mutuality of interests between business and society. It creates and delivers value for people and the planet, as well as profits.
• Co-creation is challenging as it requires broadcasting problems outside the organisation — to customers and, potentially, competitors.
• Companies are using co-creation to solve a multitude of challenges, from delivery of live organs for transplant (FedEx) to environmentally friendly, low-cost ways of extracting oil (GE) to how to make call centres more personal (Microsoft).

Focus	Attitude
Possibility	Greatness
Impact	Action
Elevate	Transformation

Chapter 13 Co-creation power … the magic of elevation

The idea of business co-creation was first elaborated by C. K. Prahalad and V. Ramaswamy in a Harvard Business Review article, ‘Co-opting customer competence', published in 2000. They saw organisations co-creating products with their customers at different stages in the product cycle.

Threadless, founded by Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart, manufactures T-shirts but it has never produced a flop, has minimal product returns and sells 100 per ...