The Power of Co-Creation

January 10, 2011
With the Internet sparking a cultural shift towards collaboration and participatory commerce, and customers demanding engagement in products at unprecedented levels, corporations and institutions are scrambling to figure out the new rules of business. Likewise, employees are demanding involvement in determining company direction, and executives are discovering that accepting it brings success. In their first book together, Ramaswamy (The Future of Competition) and Gouillart (Transforming the Organization) highlight several examples, ranging from Starbucks to Summerset Houseboats, of companies moving from a top-down to a bottom-up approach and establishing cost-effective measures like crowd-sourcing to meet local needs. The authors make an excellent case by examining the successful integration of these strategies, but they never quite make the leap beyond their single-line strategy and urge for implementation. For general readers this will suffice, but it would have been helpful had the authors included implementation strategies for organizations with more limited resources as well. Still, their advice is timely and should prove beneficial to people looking for a fresh take on business strategies.