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The co-creation spectrum

26th August 2008, 05:32 pm  by Matt Rhodes

Over the past few days we have posted five types of co-creation. From those which involve only the customer and their own product to those which don’t involve the brand at all. These types can be seen as on a spectrum of co-creation with the following characteristics and variables:

  1. Who controls the process – brand or customer?
  2. Who is involved – only customers or a range of external stakeholders?
  3. Who benefits – does the co-creation impact upon the customer’s personal experience or the broader experience of all customers?
  4. What is the legacy – does the co-creation impact upon the customer’s version of the product alone or does it change the ultimate design?

This allows us to understand the five main types of co-creation highlighted in the series:

This is a typology we will be working on at FreshNetworks, but is one we use to analyse and understand innovation and co-creation in the social media and online community sites we see and work on.

A full list of the case studies for the five types we have show are below:

Some more reading

Category: Co-creation series, Innovation, Matt Rhodes  |  Comment (RSS)  |  Trackback

4 Comments

  1. Chi-chi Ekweozor:

    Fantastic stuff. Really enjoying this series, Matt.

    You may want to check out GetSatisfaction.com as another example of community product design.

    The absolute genius behind GetSatisfaction’s customer service via a user community is that users/customers a.k.a people who care virtually end up doing most of the legwork for the company.

    Sure it might not feel that way during the process, witness Twitter’s PR pain over the last few weeks, however, it’s plain to see it works.

    GetSatisfaction’s homepage says it all:

    “Active companies in Get Satisfaction right now:

    Twitter – 3786 Topics powered by tens of thousands of people with help from 19 employees”

    27 August 2008, 10:15 pm

  2. sivam:

    Great Break down of co-creation. I discuss this further in my blog http://genometri.com/blog/?p=126#more-126

    Sivam

    1 October 2008, 6:15 pm

  3. Gary Schirr:

    A very interesting typology of co-creation.

    I am going to link my blog to this posting to try to get some feedback on what service innovators think of these categories.

    1 October 2008, 11:14 pm

  4. The co-creation spectrum « nicomorelli:

    [...] October 19, 2008 The co-creation spectrum [...]

    19 October 2008, 10:08 am

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