Co-creation and why should you care

Co-creation is all the buzz in many industries. What is it anyway and how do we benefit from it?

What is Co-creation?: Its collaborative creation or collective creation of the product or service by all of the stakeholders involved. this term became very popular after it was the subject of several books.

The best metaphor for co-creation that I have heard is of communal folk music. There are a troupe of musicians who are playing music in the village grounds. People are singing along. Some others are making noises… some one else is humming. A few young guys and gals jump in and starts dancing. Some even play an instrument or two. Everybody is participating. There is a no clear separation between the artist and the audience. Everybody becomes part of the creation by just being in the space.

Now imagine a global village of participants. They are not just audience or consumers any more. Yes it seems massively chaotic and the equation of power is changing. It is really about changing the core of the product and not just personalizing it.

How can we start co-creating and fitting it in to a product development process. If you are media facilitator its a little bit straight forward. You setup a framework or scaffold for people to create content and allow them to communicate and collaborate. Then market the hell out of it and hope everything works. It’s a little bit different for most of the companies out there.

You can start the co-creation process early in the development process by giving some of the same tools that is available to designers and engineers. Of course simplifying it down to bare minimum. These can be called tools for building future scenarios. The product development team usually starts with a product and then looks for future scenarios. People look at their life, their dreams and then look for future scenarios. Both valid approaches to innovation and coming from opposite sides. The intersection is usually where breakthrough innovation happens

I’ll write more about the participatory mindset in my next post.

Tagged as: co-creation, cocreation, design research, participatory, scenarios