C.K. Prahalad is a colleague of Adam’s. His most recent book The Future of Competition is going to be highlighted March 30, 2005 at a University of Michigan symposium on experience co-creation. The university is launching its co-creation center. Good luck to Professor Ramaswamy on his efforts to get more businesses to incorporate customers in the marketing process!!
Ramaswamy and Prahalad use the same facts about business troubles as we use. They then use these facts as a burning platform to say businesses need to change their approach to marketing. They recommend bringing customers into the marketing process – co-creating products, distribution, promotion and pricing with customers. Overall, the act of co-creation is undoubtedly a good thing. I think better competitors already recognize the need for co-creation, and some are beginning to adopt such activity.
My speaking experience confirms that these facts are easily absorbed and agreed to by audiences. Unfortunately too often these facts are not "compelling" to people. The facts do not create a great enough sense of fear to cause people to change. Despite the ominous predicted outcomes (and they are ominous), reciting the facts does not create a Disruption (pattern interrupt) for people. The fact that businesses are in trouble is accepted. People seem willing to live with a disquieted concern while continuing past practices. In order to consider change, audiences want to know what to do about it. And here the co-creation authors say "go undertake experience co-creation."
As good as this idea is, it seems to me the authors have underestimated the organizational challenges faced when implementing a transformation of the magnitude they propose. We would recommend the authors augment their recommendations with more about how companies will change their embedded process, which (after all) was built upon past success. Our fear is that existing organizational Lock-in will keep organizations from embracing the next practice of experience co-creation.
It would seem to us that the only way experience co-creation can be implemented is if people incorporate it into their Success Formulas, and accomplishing that requires starting the effort in White Space and then migrating the organization toward these new processes. Our experiences would indicate that for most companies existing processes will be totally effective roadblocks to any organization actually attempting to implement this powerful new approach.
Overall, what these authors want readers to do is clear, but we would recommend they more powerfully explain the re-invention gap which exists between what companies do (from a traditional firm-centric vantage) and what would be more successful (a robust two-way dialogue with customers) in sufficient detail to drive leaders toward undertaking a disruption (pattern interrupt). Our case work has shown that only after this challenge-based disruption can White Space for these ideas take root. It’s unclear from this book exactly what these authors would have companies do to implement, but we would observe that simply attempting to change existing processes to incorporate co-creation is extremely unlikely to work.
Our work indicates that readers who want to fully capitalize on the promise of experiece co-creation can increase markedly the odds of a big win if they apply co-creation to White Space projects which can operate freed from existing Lock-in and thus develop a new Success Formula built on co-creation. These new Success Formulas forged in White Space can then act as magnets for the existing organization to migrate toward a more customer-centric approach to marketing. The co-creation idea is clever, and combined with our approach using disruption and white space can have tremendously beneficial impact – quickly.
