Digital Concept: Co-Creation

The first digital marketing concept is customer co-creation. In the book "Innovation Happens Elsewhere" there is a quot, "Innovation happens everywhere, but there is simply more elsewhere than here." 

Now if you think about it that's true for just about anything- happiness, sadness, eating, sleeping; that there's more activity happening elsewhere than here. So for example, the University of Illinois has lots of smart professors and students, but most of the smart professors and students in the world are not here in Champagne. And the author realized this concept and employed this to benefit its innovation process. Essentially the idea that there are more resources for innovation outside the firm than inside the firm, so they've leveraged these fields and resources; we're still their contributors, to enhance their innovation processes. And this is really the core idea of customer co-creation. The realization that your customers can actually help enhance your new-product development activities. 

But us customers are not only buying your products they may also help design and develop them. This is a radical departure from the more traditional internally focused innovation processes that most firms had used in the past. Let's provide a few more examples of customer co-creation. Another example form the open-source software domain is Apache. And I may not have heard of Apache before, but Apache is the world's foremost and most widely used server software. Indeed over half of all websites are run using Apache software. And the development and maintenance of this software is almost entirely done via customer co-creation. 

A second example, a bit more consumer-focused, is the video game called "Little BIG Planet" it's offered by Sony. It's now in its third edition, and this game if you haven't played it before has a built in tool kit; a design platform that allows players to create their own levels, and is very similar to the design platform used by professional game developers. Currently, this game has over 8 million levels, and nearly all of them were created by its customers. A third example comes from the clothing domain, the t-shirt manufacturer "Threadless" located in Chicago in the U.S. It was voted as one of the most innovative companies in America. This innovative clothing firm has no in-house design team. Instead, it gets all its designs from its customers. We'll discuss Threadless in more depth during our case study of this company. Now, now that you have these examples let's provide a bit more of a formal definition of what customer co-creation is. We look at customer co-creation as contributions made by customers that assist a firm in the design and development of its new-product offerings. Here we use the term customers quite broadly, so these contributions may also come from non customers, but this is a bit less likely. 

Typically, these contributions are made using a web-based platform, thus they're a good example of a digital marketing tool.