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The Co-Creation Imperative: How To Make Organizational Change Collaborative

This article is more than 6 years old.

Lego’s IDEAS platform. Ramaswamy And Gouillart On Co-Creation

Image by Simone Mescolini via Getty Images

We can learn a lot about engaging employees in organizational change from Lego's pioneering approach to co-created product design. Lego’s IDEAS website is an excellent example of an online co-creation platform. Here is how it works. The website invites Lego enthusiasts to post designs for new play-sets and to vote and give feedback on submitted projects. If a project receives over 10,000 votes, it goes into a review phase where Lego set designers and marketing professionals decide if the product is viable for production. The voting mechanism motivates creators to mobilize their social network to vote for their submission, effectively enlisting customers in brand promotion. The creator of a new Lego set is recognized in the set materials and receives a royalty of 1% of net sales. One bird-loving Lego enthusiast designed a Robin, Blue Jay and Hummingbird made of the famous bricks. The models flew off the shelves and have grossed the creator close to $30,000 dollars in royalties for three months of sales. Lego engages actively with the IDEAS community via a blog where the company presents the most exciting projects and presents the winners.

The power of co-creation has been established by many leading consumer brands, among them Apple, Google, Ikea, Nike and Starbucks. These companies have successfully embraced this new paradigm to revolutionize how they relate to their customers, engaging them continuously in the process of ideating, producing, and marketing products. Airbnb or Uber have shot to the top out of nowhere by using co-creative platform technologies to turn passive consumers into active providers of goods and services.

The Theory

Co-creation is a strategy that brings together multiple parties to jointly produce a mutually valued outcome. The paradigm was put on the map by C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy beginning in 2000 with their article Co-Opting Customer Competence. The book The Power of Co-Creation, by Ramaswamy and Francis Gouillart, provides an excellent discussion of how co-creation can support organizational change.

Co-creation starts out by shifting away from a traditional company-centric perspective that views the consumer as a passive outsider with whom the company transacts primarily at the point of purchase. The co-creation paradigm conceives the consumer instead as an integral part of the system for value creation. Customer and enterprise can co-create value at multiple points of the value chain. Underlying this consumer-centric model is the idea that customers have intellectual capital that is worth tapping into for producing a superior customer experience. Not only are consumers willing to share the workload of ideating, designing and marketing products. They will also be more loyal customers, and in many instances even be willing to pay a premium. This is a sweet spot if ever there was one.

The Practice

Co-creation can take many forms, from the formal to the informal, from online to offline. But co-creation always requires a platform of one kind or another.

  • Online platforms: With the advent of new information technologies, especially Web 2.0, mobile technology and social media, online-enabled co-creation platforms have gained momentum. Lego IDEAS is a prime example. The unique advantage of well-designed online platforms is that they can facilitate co-creation by an infinite number of participants from anywhere and at any time.  While they are powerful tools, they are technically relatively simple applications. For any large organization looking to engage its employees in organizational change, setting up a web-based co-creation platform should be a no-brainer.
  • Personal interactions: Personal interactions can also provide a co-creation platform. Some co-creative techniques include brainstorming, prototyping, simulation, or interviewing. More important than any particular format or method is a bias towards interactivity. Any meeting can be turned into a co-creative platform as long as someone with basic facilitation skills is present. An organization has become truly co-creative if its people are capable of switching into a co-creative mode at a moment’s notice whenever an interesting problem pops up. They switch with ease between divergent and convergent thinking, between filling the ideas canvas with many bold solutions and then paring them down to the ones that are most desirable, feasible and viable. Productive co-creative interaction requires a few basic methodological skills from facilitators and participants, but it ain’t rocket surgery. All it takes is for an organization to make facilitation skills available to its employees through training and practice.
  • Embedding dialog into processes: Co-creation can also take the form of systematically embedding dialog into routinized interactions with users. Asking for feedback in an employee survey every few years is useful, but not sufficient. Customer relationship management applications illustrate how feedback can be embedded into every user interaction through simple rating systems, comments, chat functionality or short user surveys. Organizations can stimulate organizational improvement by applying these same methods to their routine interactions with employees. Upon training completion, we can ask employees how their experience could be improved. We can do the same with any other employee-facing process, whether it relates to recruitment, on-boarding, performance management, rewards systems, or separation.

It is important not to think of co-creation as an isolated event, but rather as the habituated way in which members of an organization approach change. Co-creation unfolds its full transformative potential once it has become an organization’s general mindset infusing collaborative interactions in all their forms.

Co-Creation And Organizational Change

To date, application of co-creation platforms has focused primarily on customer engagement, but these platforms hold equal promise for co-producing organizational change. Co-creative platforms can support a broad range of change objectives, from implementing new technology, post-merger integration, restructuring, or culture transformation. The benefits are manifold:

  • Ideation: Co-creation can generate a wealth of ideas for improving an organization’s operations. By looking at the rich canvas of ideas that emerges, underlying connections or themes can be uncovered. Similar ideas can be grouped into meaningful clusters and scaled. A systemic view of improvement opportunities can emerge. An important role of co-creative leaders is to extract the value embedded in the rich portfolio of ideas that results from the process.
  • Human-centeredness: My previous post presented the case that effective design is human-centered design. For organizational design to support desired behaviors, it must reflect employees’ needs and aspirations. By inviting employees to be co-designers of organizational change, co-creation allows organizations to identify those needs.
  • Social capital: The interaction involved in co-creation nurtures stronger relationships among participants. Employees develop greater loyalty with the organization, both because co-creation stimulates positive interaction, and because this interaction results in a workplace experience more reflective of employees’ needs.
  • Agency: The concept of human agency is critically important to the subject of organizational change (see previous post). Co-creation is a powerful method to affirm employees’ agency. Co-creation invites and challenges employees to participate proactively in organizational improvement. In the process of co-creation, employees experience what Albert Bandura refers to as enactive and vicarious mastery experience. Put differently, co-creation allows employees to experience themselves affecting meaningful change in their work environment, and they observe others doing the same. These experiences strengthen employees’ self- and collective efficacy as change agents, which is a strong predictor of future performance.

According to conventional change management models, ideation of change ideas is the reserved prerogative of top management and their consultants. Employees’ involvement is largely confined to unquestioning implementation. This top-heavy approach typically results in a lackluster, impoverished change process, focused narrowly on only one or two big-ticket items. Most employees have valuable insights into how the organization can be improved. And they are ready to champion these ideas. But conventional change management has no appreciation for these ideas. It does not seek to understand what change ideas front-line employees care about and are ready to mobilize behind. As a result, a lot of value remains unclaimed on the table. A nightmare for any self-respecting manager. Co-creation platforms show there is a better way. Much is to be gained from engaging employees in the entire change process, from ideation to implementation. The tools and methods are there for transforming organizations together with employees. It is time we put them to use.

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