The Power of Co-Creation: Build It with Them to Boost Growth, Productivity, and Profits

Apple embraced co-creation to enhance the speed and scope of its innovation, generat­ing over $1 billion for its App-Store partner-developers in two years, even as it overtook Microsoft in market value. Starbucks launched its online platform MyStarbucksIdea.com to tap into ideas from customers and turbocharged a turnaround. Unilever turned to co-creation for redesigning prod­uct lines such as Sunsilk shampoo and revitalized growth. Nike achieved remarkable success with its Nike+ co-creation initiative, which enables a com­munity of over a million runners to interact with one another and the company, increasing its market share by 10 percent in the first year.

Co-creation involves redefining the way organizations engage individualscustomers, employees, suppliers, partners, and other stake­holdersbringing them into the process of value creation and engaging them in enriched experi­ences, in order to
• formulate new breakthrough strategies
• design compelling new products and services
• transform management processes
• lower risks and costs
• increase market share, loyalty, and returns

In this pathbreaking book, Venkat Ramaswamy (who coined the term co-creation with C. K. Prahalad) and Francis Gouillart, pioneers in working with com­panies to develop co-creation practices, show how every organizationfrom large corporation to small firm, and government agency to not-for-profitcan achieve win morewin more results with these methods. Based on extraordinary research and the authors hands-on experiences with successful projects in co-creation at dozens of the worlds most exciting organizations, The Power of Co-Creation illustrates with detailed examples from leading firms such as those above, as well as from Cisco, GlaxoSmithKline, Ama­zon, Jabil, Predica, Wacoal, Caja Navarra, and many others, how enterprises have used a wide range of engagement platformsand how they have even restructured internal management processesin order to harness the power of co-creation.

As the authors wealth of examples make vividly clear, enterprises can no longer afford to view custom­ers and other stakeholders as passive recipients of their products and services but must learn to engage them in defining and delivering enhanced value. Co-creation goes beyond the conventional process view of qual­ity, re-engineering, and lean thinking, and is the essential new mind-set and practice for boosting sus­tainable growth, productivity, and profits in the future.