Online Co-Creation to Accelerate Marketing & Innovation

In this new guide, eYeka discusses what co-creation is, its applications, highlights what types of audience are best suited for it, reviews participants’ motivations and provide a step-by-step framework of how businesses can get started with a co-creation project. The guide is peppered with some of the best co-creation case studies from Coca-Cola, LEGO, Local Motors and French Telecom company SFR.

Co-creation explained by Knowledge Marketing

Involving consumers in value creation process is not just a trend. Collaborative innovation, co-creation, co-design are becoming natural to the most innovative companies. Therefore, even the collaboration with consumers is growing, notalways the reasons remain clear. Why do companies need to work with consumers and not just propose them brands and products? What is behind the simple brands’ wish to try co-creation?

“Co-creation responds to customer desires”, says Professor Emmanuelle le Nagard

Co-creation is a trend today. Some companies experiment it, some others are still reluctant…How do academics perceive co-creation? How do they describe value that collaboration with consumers brings to business? Recently we interviewed Marketing Professor Emmanuelle le Nagard from ESSEC Business School about her vision of co-creation and participative innovation.

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Francis Gouillart’s universal view of co-creation

We recently interviewed Professor Venkat Ramaswamy, author of the book The Power Of Co-creation, who shared interesting thoughts about how co-creation relates to crowdsourcing, challenges and the value of co-creation, co-creators and potholes to avoid as well as the highly discussed co-creator Apple. Curious as we are, we thought that meeting his co-author, Francis Gouillart, would reveal even more about co-creative strategies and their fields of application. We met Francis Gouillart right after the presentation of the French version of The Power Of Co-Creation: L’entreprise co-créative.

Geoff Mulgan about the state of social innovation

When it comes to innovation, we’re not only talking about corporate strategies or marketing initiatives; we’re also talking about social welfare. Geoff Mulgan recently presented the state of the field in social innovation at UNESCO’s HQ in Paris, where he talked about practice, theory and the future of the concept. The simple question he asked was “Why is the world so good in developping nanotechnologies, implementing cloud computing or shooting people to the moon (or mars), and incapable of tackling wicked problems like child obesity, waste or isolation of elderly people?“.

“Co-creation with the masses does not work”, says professor Eric Vernette

Well before brands even started showing interest in topics like co-creation, crowdsourcing and collaborative innovation, university researchers were already evaluating the phenomenon driving importance of increased consumer voice. Not only did they discover positive aspects from integrating the client in the value-creation process but they also noted limits and insisted on defining clear collaboration procedures.

First large-scale surveys show how much consumers innovate… and how businesses are lagging behind

Eric Von Hippel started talking about lead-user innovation as early as in the mid-eighties. Sonn after, consumer participation in service delivery and product development started to gain momentum in the nineties, and the first articles about co-creation were published in 2000. Even though these trends are obvious today, few hard facts have been published about consumer vs. business innovation. This post discusses the results of two quite recent surveys, the first ones to analyse this phenomenon on a large scale.

Research shows higher creative engagement of lead-users and emergent customers

In previous blog posts, we talked about research results which compared lead-users to emergent customers in the generation of new product ideas. We also mentioned recent studies which indicate that consumer innovation is NOT a niche phenomenon, and that companies would gain significant innovation power if they find ways to open up to this distributed innovative potential. While research about user innovation started in the eighties, more recent research streams focus on the quantification of consumer innovation or the link between creativity and innovation.

How we could reconcile “creativity” with “rationality” to spur innovation

A great read from a recent edition of Creativity and Innovation Management is the article Stimulating Creative Rationality to Stimulate Innovation. It was writtenby two French researchers: Joëlle Forest, PhD in economics, who likes to explore the relationships between design and innovation, and Michel Faucheux, PhD in literature, who focuses his research around the narrative role of technology. Together, they argue that the Western tradition has separated “creativity” from “rationality” for too long, and that innovation requires both!

Creativity takes time, even in online co-creation contests

Very recently, the Hungarian ad agency Café Creative released a video that yielded a simple yet true message: creativity takes time! To prove this, they asked young kids to draw a clock (1) in 10 seconds, and (2) in 10 minutes. Unsurprisingly, the second wave of drawings was much more original than the first one: the kids reinvented the clock as animals, flowers, kites…). While this little experiment shows obvious results, the fact that creativity takes time has also been proved in scientific litterature… and even at eYeka where we came up with the same finding!