online co-creation to accelerate marketing & innovation

Online Co-creation

to Accelerate Marketing

& Innovation

2 | Online Co-creation To Accelerate Marketing and Innovation

Online Co-creation to Accelerate

Marketing and Innovation

“How to unlock the collective creative power in consumers to lead existing markets and create new ones, fast.”

A decade ago, acclaimed Harvard University Professor Michael Porter, a leading authority on corporate strategy, asserted that innovation was the central issue in economic prosperity. Today, innovation is firmly on every CEO’s priority list but the capability to bring the right innovation to the market quickly is still lacking. But business leaders could have been searching in the wrong places. Yochai Benkler, the thought-provoking author of “The Wealth of Networks”, argues that the solution may lie within consumers and not within firms. What if companies could tap into the free flow of ideas generated by millions of people online to innovate?

This white paper is designed as a crash course on online co-creation so that marketers and innovators can better understand how to unlock the collective creative power latent in consumers to accelerate marketing and innovation.


A. Co-creation 101 Embracing Online Co-creation to Accelerate Marketing and Innovation

Innovation is the key to sustainable growth. It is the primary – and increasingly vital – source of competitive advantage for businesses in a marketplace that has become exponentially cluttered, complex and dynamic. “The way you will thrive in this environment is by innovating – innovating in technologies, innovating in strategies, innovating in business models,” said IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano in a recent interview with BusinessWeek on “The World’s Most Innovative Companies”ii.

While innovation is steadily climbing up every CEO’s corporate agenda, so is the realization that ideas alone don’t really matter much without the capability to implement the right ones faster than competitors do. And herein lies the problem with innovation as it is practiced today. The BCG annual innovation surveys constantly highlight that senior executives find the current innovation process hard to systemize and frustratingly slowiii. Neville Roberts, enterprise CIO of Best Buy sums up why innovating fast matters in an interview with ZDNet: “A lot of our revenues come from innovation, but it gets copied quickly (...) We have to get innovation out there quickly. We have to bring things to fruition quicker than everyone else.”iv

When the name of the game is to be the first to bring the right innovation to market, co-creation is the solution that numerous companies increasingly turn to. The traditional innovation process is sequential: developing concepts and testing them, mostly internally or with a small network of external agents. It takes up a significant amount of time and has a high failure rate. Consumers are involved at the tail-end, as validators.

Co-creation flips the traditional innovation model on its head, turning a sequential process into a parallel one. Co-creation engages consumers directly at the onset of the innovation process to gain fresh, fast and creative ideas that are consumer-rooted, streamlining and compressing a complex chain of ideation-validation steps with multiple stakeholders. When it happens online, it enables simultaneous engagements with a large number of individuals across geographies within a short timeframe. Because co-creation starts with input from end-users, there is less chance that the concepts suggested would not get market acceptance, thus reducing risks of failed projects.

The business enterprise has

two – and only two – basic functions:

marketing and innovation.

Peter Drucker, Management Professor,

Authori


C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy, co-authors of “The Future of Competition: Co-creating unique value with customers”, define co-creation as “an active, creative and social process based on collaboration between producers and users, initiated by the firm to generate value for customers”v. Instead of building for consumers, companies build with them. Co-creation can take many forms: A company can co-create a new product with a small number of lead users in a lab or “crowdsource” a problem online to get a large number of individuals working simultaneously to solve it.

Co-creation is also simply defined by Doug William, analyst and co-creation expert at Forrester Research, as “the act of involving consumers directly, and in some cases repeatedly, in the

product creation or innovation process. Companies engage with consumers on initial product concepts and ideas, and they use consumers as a resource throughout the product development life cycle.”vi

Online co-creation in particular is gaining traction with businesses. Most of Interbrand’s 100 Best Global Brands 2011, such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Hyundai, Danone, Starbucks and Nike, are already actively using online co-creation platforms and communities to involve consumers directly and repeatedly to infuse their communication and products with fresh ideas, content and solutions.

1. What is Co-creation?

David Skerrett, Head of Social and Mobile,

Euro RSCG 4D

Co-creation projects are a

wonderful mix of market research

and marketing. It’s a virtuous circle

whereby the brief fulfills consumers,

enabling them to express their

creativity, and the brand benefits from content that we can celebrate and gain insights from, and

potentially even use as part of our

communication materials.


Why do creative people get involved in co-creation? The eYeka example.Research undertaken on eYeka’s community of nearly 200,000 creative consumers uncovered four primary motivations for participating in co-creation projects: Fun, Fulfillment, Fame and Fortune, commonly referred to as ‘the four Fs’.

Aristotle understood long ago that Man is by nature a social animal. The meteoric rise in popularity of social networking platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter shows how powerful our need to create and share with others is, with little incentive needed to participate.

Creative individuals churn out imaginative ideas that companies might not have the resources to cultivate from scratch. They offer an alternative to thorough product development programs, which is still based on internal R&D and marketing.

With technology becoming more personalized and interconnected, the potential for consumers to reprogram, adapt, modify, and transform offerings also becomes greater.

In fact, the equivalent expenditure that these “creative consumers” spend on these co-creative activities can outstrip the annual amount spent on consumer product R&D by companies, such as in the UK where it is valuated at 144% of what companies spend on R&Dvii.

These consumers do not necessarily create to help brands. In surveys conducted in Japan, the

United Kingdom and the United States of America, consumers stated that they create or modify products “to better fit their needs” as the current standardized products offered in the market did not fulfill them adequately. Beyond utilitarian motives, consumers create as a mean of self-expression and personal fulfillment. A study conducted by eYeka in France found that 69% of consumers create for enjoyment and 72% find these activities satisfying and fulfilling.

2. Why do consumers co-create?

In essence, while consumers create for self-expression and self-actualization, these apparently self-centered activities can benefit a brand by providing a source of inspiration and ready-to-market innovation ideas. Paul Sloane, author of “A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing”, describes it as “the ability to change things, the ability to influence the future of your brand”viii.

Fun

Fulfilment Fame

Fortune


If there is only one word to describe the core benefit of co-creation for businesses, it has to be “transformational”. In 2008, Venkat Ramaswamy and Francis Gouillart, authors of “The Power of Co-Creation”, were invited to speak at the Deloitte Co-Creation Conference, organized by ECC Partnership in Paris. They pointed out five major areas where co-creation can add value to organizations:

3. What’s in it for businesses?

Customer experience Be it rewards programs, consumer communication, enhancements in retail channels, or improvements in pre- and post-purchase experiences

Products and services Improvement on current offerings and new opportunities for future development

Markets Establishing deeper understanding through innovative insights or exploring opportunities in expanding market size and/or share

Business modelsRefining or exploring a total change

Strategy Refining or re-defining the entire business approach

1

2

3

4

5

One specific benefit stemming from the

transformational nature of online

co-creation is an opportunity to

discover a game changer, which is a

radical departure from old business

models and strategies, unlocked

by consumers but not immediately apparent

to a company.


How LEGO reinvented itself through co-creation

Danish toy manufacturer LEGO Group, known for its iconic colorful building blocks, is a perfect example of how co-creation can ripple through the five areas of transformation identified by Ramaswamy and Gouillard to radically reshape the company and its business model.

In 2004, the LEGO Group was facing bankruptcy – sales declined sharply by 30% in 2003 and the business had been largely unprofitable between 1998 and 2004viii. LEGO already knew that its customers were central to the creation of its products, especially post-purchase when they build LEGO models

their own way or re-use blocks to invent their own. But the company had never placed its customers in the driving seat of its business strategy.

LEGO’s first foray into creating a more collaborative company started with LEGO Mosaic, an online tool that allowed users to calculate the number of bricks required to make a wall-hanging mosaic of different colors with the photographs that they uploaded on the platform. The success of this project widened LEGO’s perspective on the potential of co-creation and soon LEGO Factory, a platform where users can calculate the number of bricks and other components required for their own designs, followed.

LEGO also provided an extension of this service – allowing anyone to develop his or her ideas with LEGO’s design tools and order the relevant blocks. LEGO then sent the necessary blocks so that these creative consumers can actually build their creations. It was such a hit that limited-edition models by consumers-turned-designers were soon reportedly fetching handsome prices on auction sites like eBay. The LEGO Group later allowed these consumers to profit from creating new LEGO models and turned it into a complete creative-collaborative platform. LEGO now uses its community of passionate, engaged creators to invent and test new products before launching them. LEGO even works closely with its most creative consumers by co-creating designs and allows revenue sharing on the sales of these designsix. Today, the Lego Group remains the most popular toy maker of all time, truly empowering people to transform their dreams into reality, one LEGO brick at a time.


Beyond the development of new products or the generation of fresh consumer ideas, online co-creation can also help solve traditional marketing challenges such as branding, positioning or creating unique consumer experiences.

Enhancing brand experience with consumer-created contentCoca-Cola recently ran an online co-creation contest on eYeka’s platform, inviting consumers to “interpret Coca-Cola as an energizing refreshment in their own style”. Participants thought that the short, open brief allowed them to express their personality while challenging their creative skills. As a participant summed it up: “the chance to generate ideas for large brands is absolutely fantastic and challenging”. While the contest offered significant cash prizes, the winner in the video/animation category was to be selected to enter the Cannes Lion Advertising Festival in 2012, offering the highest

international peer recognition for any aspiring creative. The contest received nearly 2,600 entries (photos, illustrations, animation and videos) in only 12 weeks and the quality was deemed to equal those of professional creative agencies. Leonardo O’Grady, ASEAN Director of Integrated

Marketing Communications of Coca-Cola, who commissioned the project, said that the phenomenal response had a “ripple effect on the organization in the way we do things, the way we look at accessing creative and fresh ideas”.

In a recent project, eYeka worked with a leading FMCG brand to help reposition a yoghurt drink. Consumers were asked to illustrate how they understood a brand promise so as to refresh the brand’s communication with new creative angles. In addition to identifying creative routes for communication, this seven-week project uncovered a previously overlooked consumer benefit that could have great potential in strategically differentiating the brand from others in the market. This benefit is now a central component of a new brand platform and will form the basis of all new communication worldwide.

A creator’s entry submission for the Photography category

Screenshot of a creator's entry submission for the Video category


Jeffrey Grau, Principal Analyst at eMarketer and Author of “How Brands Co-Create Value with Customers”xi, highlights that “the benefits are numerous, with companies gaining user insights and customers enjoying higher product satisfaction”.

P&G was one of the first major companies to understand the value of opening up to outside sources when it launched its open innovation platform Connect+Develop in 2000. In the seven years that followed, profits tripled to US$10 billion, with a US$100 billion increment in market capitalizationxii. Today, more than 50% of the company’s innovation comes from outside sources.

As with open innovation, online co-creation transforms a closed innovation model into an open model. Professor Venkat Ramaswamy articulates a unique combination of three major benefits that co-creation provides: Acceleration of innovation cycles, reduced risks of market failure through closer consumer engagement and the build-up of an innovative organizational culturexiii.

4. What are the business benefits of co-creation?

4.1 Online co-creation accelerates innovation cyclesDespite understanding the crucial need to innovate, the end-point of the innovation race remains elusive at best for many businesses. According to the Boston Consulting Group’s 2010 Senior Executive Innovation Survey, even though a huge majority of senior executives polled saw innovation as their top three priorities, a significant percentage felt that lengthy development times was one of the biggest obstacles for investing in innovationxiv. As market cycles accelerate, the traditional process to find good ideas, get them endorsed, allocate budget for development – with numerous iterative levels of approvals and budgets needed in-between – is painstakingly slow, and frustrating. In the worst-case scenario, your competitor beats you to it by launching their new competitive product first. As the saying goes, good ideas are important but the ability to execute fast is what matters most.

An increasing number of companies are beginning to realize that online co-creation enables the innovation process to be faster and more streamlined, thereby increasing chances of delivering the right product or a new communication idea faster than others who are still suck with traditional innovation methods. Online co-creation communities can dramatically accelerate the pace of innovation, bringing down the ideation cycle from months to weeks. François Pétavy, Global CEO of eYeka, recently said in an interview with Forrester Researchxv that “involving external, creative, decentralized points of view provides clients with consumer-rooted collective intelligence, which is now critical as markets become even more globalized and as marketers need to intimately connect to consumers’ unmet needs, faster than ever”.


A Local Motors Micro Factory

The Rally Fighter

4.2 Online co-creation reduces risks of producing a market flop

“With co-creation, we not only give the consumer a golden opportunity to express him or herself but also to get involved with all the different steps – like imagining new communication forms or participating in the development of a prototype of a product or service,” said Eric Vernette, Professor of Marketing at the University of Toulouse and Chair of the Center for Management Research.

Involving consumers at the beginning of a business process results in greater alignment in consumer demand and manufacturer/retailer supply. Hence, not only are products designed closer to consumers’ needs, but mass customization strategies also allow on-demand and made-to-order products, by which consumers truly co-create their product. Research has shown that this experience of co-creation leads consumers to highly value the products they built themselvesxvi. This reduces the risk that a product does not meet consumer needs and wantsxvii.

A good illustration of how co-creation can close the gap between consumers and brands is Local Motors, a US based

car manufacturer with a truly co-creative business model. Its first co-created vehicle, the Rally Fighter started off with a car design competition with the winning design voted and refined collectively by a community of enthusiastsxviii. Once the design was adopted, the company accepted pre-orders and invited future owners to watch or participate in the production process at their nearest Local Motors Micro-Factory, which is a local garage or factory that supports the initiative. Customers get the blueprint, the parts and access to an online resource to share assembling tips and troubleshoot potential problems. Through this innovative manufacturing experiment, Rally Fighter owners get a car that is tailored exactly to their needs. The model cuts down on production waste by building only what is necessary and on transportation costs associated with shipping manufactured cars. So far 25 cars have been built and another 120 are scheduled for completion in 2012. Local Motors is now putting a more sophisticated CAD design software online to allow its community to collaborate even deeper in the development of new models, and social network facilities to facilitate exchange of ideas. The company hopes that this new environmentally friendly, sustainable model can become a blueprint for manufacturing in the 21st century.


4.3 Online co-creation creates a stronger innovation culture for brands

Gaurav Bhalla, CEO of Knowledge Kinetics, Chief Innovation Officer at Passenger and author of “Collaboration and Co-creation: New Platforms for Marketing and Innovation” has been consulting with a number of large MNCs on innovation issues. His experience is that co-creation can help create a better innovation culture by “opening up a company to different voices and by erasing the boundaries that prevent the company from being connected to its environment”xx. This serves as a motivation or an aspiration for employees to see and work in new ways or perspectives that may spark off new ideas. The acceleration of innovation cycles, made possible by online co-creation also provides more visible “quick wins” that in turn encourage more employees to step out of their comfort zone, collaborate and seek a higher level of innovation in their work.

Bernhard Räber, Innovation Manager, Carlsberg Breweries

Online co-creation allows us to tap into a global group of idea

generators, which indeed gives us an

outside view on our brands and products. Furthermore it gives

us scalability in terms of number of

ideas generated in a short period of time.


B. Co-creation 102 Get started with online co-creationLouis Pasteur, the French chemist famously said: “Chance favors the prepared mind”. The following building blocks of online co-creation programs will help speed up your learning curve on your very first project, or improve existing ones.

Step 1: Define your online co-creation objectives

Before considering audiences, platforms or what to do with consumers’ output, defining what is the desired outcome of your online co-creation program is the pre-requisite to choose the relevant building blocks needed for a successful online co-creation project.

eYeka has developed a simple framework that identifies four areas on a typical “go to market” value chain, where online co-creation can add value.

• You can ask consumers to help identify new trends, new products or new markets. eYeka asked people to explore “how we will move in 20 years” for an automotive brand or to “imagine the future of credit-cards” for a large financial brand.

• If you have identified a market need or a consumer segment that is ripe for innovation, but do not have a product for them yet, or if you have an existing products that could find new usage, you can ask consumers to create a new product for you or innovate an existing one. eYeka recently completed a project to invent a new type of chewing gum for a socially-connected generation Y. The project delivered 80 fresh, creative ideas in three weeks, three of which are now in the company’s internal development pipeline.

• If you are looking to position, or reposition, a product or a brand. Consumers can give creative ideas for packaging, names and brand platforms. eYeka has helped several leading FMCG companies such as Kraft, P&G, Unilever and Danone in gathering faster, fresher ideas to speed up their marketing roll-out. Typical projects include interpreting a brand promise to uncover new consumer-led communication angles, injecting premiumness in packaging and creating new retail concepts.

• Finally, if you are looking for quality consumer-generated content that can connect with consumers, you can ask them to create videos, logos, pictures that can be integrated in your agency’s campaigns. With eYeka, Coca-Cola asked consumers to “interpret energizing refreshment in their own style” and received thousands of videos, animations, pictures from all over the globe. Two of them were subsequently selected to be presented at the 2012 Cannes’ Festival of Creativity.


Broad Trends/Ideas Product: eYeXplore Sample challenge to consumers: “Imagine the credit card of the future.”

Product/Service Concepts

Product: eYeNvision Sample challenge to consumers: “Invent a healthy, tasty, fun snack for kids!”

Marketing/Positioning/Experience Product: eYeMarket Sample challenge to consumers: “What makes Mini-Oreo so unique and special?”

Communication/Engagement

Product: eYeNgage Sample challenge to consumers: “Show us how BMW’s Efficient Dynamics can make the world a better place”

Framing your objectives with eYeka’s product suites

When determining what you exactly want to achieve through online co-creation, the major pitfall to avoid is to confuse online co-creation communities with online consumer panels. If a project objective is to gather deep consumer insights about existing products or consumer attitudes towards a concept or a new product, online panels, focus groups and other insight-gathering techniques will deliver better results than co-creation communities. The latter attracts creative participants looking for creative challenges. Their format with a competitive model is best suited to invent new experiences rather than provide consumer insights.

Xplore Nvision Market Ngage

Ideas Concept Product Communication


It is also important to keep expectations in check when it comes to the results of a co-creation project. Submitted entries from consumers are unlikely to be ready for use as marketing collaterals. The essence of co-creation lies with fresh, creative ideas, which will undoubtedly require fine-tuning and validation before any implementation.

One company that set the wrong expectations and struggled to manage communication on a co-creation project was Gap, the popular U.S. retail brand. Gap introduced a new logo on its website that prompted some consumer backlash on social media channels. In response, Gap invited its fans to submit their own designs on Facebook but did not provide details as to how the submitted logo would be used (compared to the new one they rolled out) nor did it mention incentives or rewards for participants. This spawned another backlash. To cap it off, Gap pulled the plug on the new logo and its crowdsourcing project, announcing that it will keep its 20-year-old blue box iconic logoxxi.

Step 2: Prepare your organization

Once a clear, achievable objective has been defined and a creative challenge articulated, it is important to ensure that there is an adequate level of support for the project in your organization. This is vital not only in the set-up phase but also in maximizing adoption of the project’s output if you need to justify its return-on-investment. As the Boston Consulting Group clearly identified in its innovation survey, a risk adverse culture is the biggest stumbling block that discourages innovation from taking roots in any organization.

Embracing online co-creation as a marketing and innovation strategy requires the coordinated effort of an entire organization, not just the marketing or R&D department. Common organizational pushbacks include the “not-invented-here” syndrome, vested interests that prevent some stakeholders from welcoming ideas from outside their realm of control and fear of failure (and its retribution). This common yet lethal cocktail results in innovation paralysis. It is expected that most people will reject creative ideas and solutions because of the discomfort they feelxxii. Yet a certain level of discomfort or uncertainty is expected in the process of exploring ideas and trying something new. These structural and cultural issues are hard to solve but steps can be taken to prepare the ground for online co-creation projects.

From this

and back to this

to this


2.1 Get commitment from the top

Convincing employees to embrace change is a big obstacle that cannot be avoided. “Conceding that people at the receiving end of traditional processes may have better ideas than the experts who have been designing those processes for many years requires a new humility,” elaborates Venkat Ramaswamy and Francis Gouillart in their article, “Building the Cocreative Enterprise”, an article published in Harvard Business Review”xxii.

The challenge befalls on leaders to make employees realize the new economic benefits that can be discovered, in order to motivate them in continuing the journey of exploring more strategic applications of co-creation. The first step required in the process of developing a more open, collaborative culture is for senior executives to champion the initiative and to demonstrate that failure is part of the creative process, with noticeable, symbolic action backing their words before any organizational changes can take place.

2.2 Start small

Some companies have ceased to recognize the possible “coexistence of external ideas or creations (consumer insights or content) and of internal ideas or creations from the company’s marketing or departments”, said Eric Vernette. Paul Sloane, author of “A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing”, suggests that “people outside should be seen as part of your system rather than customers or complainers. They are people who work with you. You have to be transparent and more open. If you have the culture in place and the process is in place, then you can succeed.” Ideally, as Eric Vernette suggested, there should be a symbiotic relationship between marketing and R&D departments and the consumer.

To develop and nurture such a culture from scratch, Venkat Ramaswamy and Francis Gouillart advise companies to start small: “Begin with a project that focuses on the experiences of two or three key stakeholders and a specific purpose like gathering customers’ requirements for a new product, improving order fulfillment, or figuring out the best sales pitch for a new offering. Then let the perimeter of co-creation naturally expand over time to include a wider range of experiences for those stakeholders and then new stakeholders. At each stage, the organization will realize new

When it comes to innovation, all companies need

a strong brand champion who knows how to

spot great ideas and maximize the

potential of each one to turn it into a

business-driving solution.

Frederique Covington-Corbett, Asia Pacific Central Marketing

Organization Lead, Microsoft


economic benefits, giving it the motivation to continue the journey and explore more and more strategic applications of co-creation.” It is also important to open communication channels such that feedback can flow freely bottom-up and allocate proper resources to look into and act on them.

2.3 Consider your legal framework

What is your organization’s comfort level in allowing outsiders to get involved in potentially strategic issues? Have you thought of the level of information that needs to be disclosed so that external participants can meaningfully contribute? For each online co-creation project, there is a need to provide information and there is no guarantee that a competitor who subscribes to the same platform could be prevented from knowing what you are working on. Several steps can be taken to preserve confidentiality yet it is crucial to be constantly reminded that the process should not be time-consuming as the vital benefits of co-creation projects are speed and relevance.

In addition to confidentiality issues, a clear legal framework for the ownership of intellectual property created by consumers in the context of an online co-creation

project must be established. You will need such framework to ensure that you can use the ideas submitted. For every contest, eYeka ensures that the legal framework benefits both the company and the participants for the duration of the contest and also for the potential use of ideas and work generated, over time.

2.4 Be ready for a conversation

Co-creation opens a communication channel with consumers. They will expect a conversation or at minimum, feedback on their work as they require support and empathy. Managing multiple streams of conversations online can prove challenging especially when participants stem from all over the world. This ongoing, social process is best handled by experts working with online communities. We call them “Community Managers”. Community Managers act as the glue to a community. They stimulate good entries, answer questions and address any issues pertaining to a contest in a timely manner. In addition to a deep understanding of the digital media landscape and of the dynamics of online communities, community managers are often proficient in a variety of languages. eYeka employs dedicated, full-time community managers to support its 200,000 strong online community, over 94 countries.


3. Engage the right audience on the right platformOnce internal challenges have been managed, marketers need to ponder over the type of audiences to reach out to, and the platforms to use for their co-creation activities.

3.1 The 1-9-90 rule

When inviting participants to an online co-creation contest, the worst question to ask is whether they are representative of a given target audience. This assumes that all consumers are equally creative. This is not the case.

Professor Eric Vernette sums up why this is the wrong question in a recent interview on the eYeka blog: “it defeats the purpose to carry out co-creation projects with masses of people who will produce varied results, leaving interesting ideas as difficult to locate as a needle in a haystack.” In fact, identifying a particularly small number of people who are “inventive and in tune with market desires” is a major challenge for marketers.

In short, what matters most in online co-creation contests, designed to collect fresh and original ideas, are the level of creativity of the participants and the extent to which they can illustrate their creativity. Representative participants will give representative answers. Creative participants will give creative answers.


eYeka segments consumers into a ratio of 90:9:1 – a concept first introduced by Jakob Nielsen, principal and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Groupxxiv.

• 90% of consumers are deemed “spectators”. They read or watch but do not contribute. They are good at talking about their experience with products and identify problems. This is the group traditionally involved in focus groups or consumer research.

• 9% of consumers are termed “enthusiasts” who actively view, share content and interesting ideas, yet do not create from scratch.

• The remaining 1% is what eYeka calls “creative consumers”. They form the basis of eYeka’s community. They have superior creative thinking capability and create content actively of which the remaining 99% view and share. Creative consumers are a bit like creative directors in an advertising agency. They are not necessarily representative of a target audience of a given brand they are working on, but they have the ability to come up with innovative solutions and messages that will resonate with them. Like with creative directors, creative consumers’ ideas should be tested with target consumers.

Brands can tap into different segments of consumers for different purposes. The 1% of creative consumers is ideal for generating novel ideas and creating original content, the 9% of enthusiasts play an important role in refining and spreading them, while the 90% of spectators validate and will ultimately purchase the resulting products.

1% Creative ConsumersUnlock innovation opportunities

9% EnthusiastsRefine innovation opportunities

90% SpectatorsValidate innovation opportunities

Not all consumers are created equal


3.2 A platform for each audience

Once you have decided on what type of consumers are best suited to participate in your online co-creation project, you need to select a channel for engagement. There are effectively three major channels you can use: Some companies choose to work with consumers directly via social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter. While these platforms are cost-efficient, they are not as effective in identifying or engaging the 1% of creative consumers that can truly deliver creative solutions. The two remaining options are leveraging existing co-creation communities or creating your own community from scratch with off-the-shelf social-consumer research platforms. These two methods require their own different approaches.

3.2.1 Use existing co-creation communities for growing ideas

Research has found different types of innovative consumers, for example lead and emergent users – usually the outliers of the intended target audiences for your product or service, have higher probability of coming up with disruptive, innovative solutionsxxv. Online co-creation communities

tend to attract this 1% of consumers who are most creative and are therefore well suited for ideation projects, applicable from “blue-ocean” thinking to brand positioning or packaging challenges.

Online co-creation communities like eYeka comprise of an existing network of consumers and experts who have specifically signed-up to participate in co-creation projects. By being open to everyone and by letting people join co-creations contests freely, eYeka has build-up a bank of creative participants who participate as soon as they are interested in the topic and have ideas to contribute. These online communities operate on a competition model, with limited prizes available for winners only. As highlighted by the works of London Business School Professor Kevin J. Boudreau and Harvard Business School Professor Karim R. Lakhanixxv, a competition model encourages the submission of disruptive, “out-of-the-norm” ideas, as there is no need to build on cumulative knowledge or past experiences, or to form a consensus.

On eYeka, community members choose which projects they want to participate in. This ensures that they are self-motivated to contribute ideas and have a degree of appreciation for the brand. Unlike participants being screened before they can join a focus group, eYeka

Market leader in online consumer

co-creation


3.2.2 Engage with your consumers on dedicated platforms for insights, idea consolidation

You will need to build or use dedicated platforms to engage your regular stakeholders in a co-creation process, be it your customers, employees, partners or suppliers. An example of such an application would be Starbucks’s online platform, MyStarbucksIdea.com where consumers are invited to contribute their ideas to improve the Starbucks experience and rate those that have already been published. These platforms largely attract brand enthusiasts (9%) and spectators (90%), which make them the ideal place to gather insights on what consumers want and consolidate ideas and concepts that were inspired and adapted from creative consumers (1%) at the ideation stage. With over 75,000 ideas and 750,000 votes generated (and counting), MyStarbucksIdea.com has become an ideal real-time insights lab, allowing the company to keep in touch with what consumers need and want, test products and constantly improve its experience.

does not impose filters or must-have characteristics to join a competition. The diversity of participants, backgrounds and opinions provides a higher chance of getting decentralised, refreshing interpretations and solutions to creative challenges. A recent example from eYeka involves a young British man who has never been to India but nevertheless created a TV spot concept that scored highest when tested with Indian consumers. This participant was a complete outlier among others who mostly stemmed from the subcontinent. The TV spot was later adopted to front a nationwide campaign for the launch of a new product.

Allowing for diversity in co-creation contests also helps discover “blind spots”. These would be existing issues or concerns that internal staff or even a small representative segment of a target audience did not see or address prior to the co-creation project.

Competition is the first stage in the ideation process, similar to a brainstorm where participants first throw in their own ideas. The second stage is to select and consolidate the best ideas to make them even better. This is where a collaboration model works best; when participants are invited to view concepts, rate them and comment on them. Here the natural tendency from participants will be a normalization of opinions, to reach a consensus.

The diversity of participants,

backgrounds andopinions provides

a higher chance of getting

decentralised, refreshing

interpretations and solutions to creative

challenges.


SFR, making learning fun for children

French telecom operator SFR was looking to develop a range of edutainment products for children. For starters, the product management team was keen to better understand how a learning experience could be made more interesting and fun for children and what type of object could best represent “edutainment” as a concept.

SFR worked with eYeka’s community of “creative consumers” on a two-stage co-creation project. The first stage focused on developing a product that facilitates a learning experience while the second was about the learning experience itself. At the first stage, eYeka launched an unbranded co-creation project on its platform, asking consumers to imagine what kind of toy Santa Claus could offer to technology savvy children for Christmas- a toy that allows them to learn while having fun. Participants were challenged to imagine the design, functions and multiple uses for this new toy. The resulting concepts proposed by consumers were then tested on SFR’s own “innovation community”, L’Atelier SFR. Across all concepts proposed, three main themes emerged. These formed the basis of the second stage of the project where eYeka’s community was asked to invent the “learning experience of tomorrow” revolving around interactivity, connectivity and intellectual challenge. Ideas submitted by the community were visible to all, so that new participants could find inspiration or build on existing concepts.

SFR gathered over a hundred ideas, in a much shorter time frame than through a traditional innovation process. Among the findings, eYeka creative consumers saw edutainment as a less rigid way of learning than what is provided in a typical classroom environment. Rather than being a passive student, edutainment toys can enable a child to become his own teacher, i.e. to learn how to learn. Such edutainment tool can help develop a child’s creativity and make him feel empowered. As technology offers innovative ways to connect to the world children can discover their world more actively, with their edutainment toy as a companion in this journey.

Through this co-creation project, SFR found a wealth of ideas and product concepts that were innovative yet true to its brand. The findings articulated some early consumer insights on edutainment while opening new possibilities for the development of its edutainment range.

“We wanted to gather new, fresh ideas because we were a bit stuck on the topic. eYeka creative community members were able to find ideas legitimate to our brand, as well as ideas that we would have had difficulty imagining. It was reassuring and stimulating at the same time. It is important to remember that creative consumers are also end-users: they have a lot of imagination, but their ideas are quite implementable”. Deborah Beddok, Product Manager, SFR

It is important to remember that

creative consumers are also end-users:

they have a lot of imagination, but

their ideas are quite implementable.

Deborah Beddok, Product Manager,

SFR


ConclusionOnline co-creation contests can accelerate the way your business innovates, shortening marketing and innovation cycles from months to weeks with creative, consumer-rooted ideas that can potentially deliver the next game-changer for your industry. As with all creative processes involving consumers, the results are never guaranteed. But in today’s highly kinetic competitive environment, the cost of inaction is greater. Leading global brands are already co-creating with eYeka. Contact the world market leader in online co-creation today to see how you can tap into the collective creative power of the largest community of creative consumers.

Authors François Pétavy, Joël Céré, Christine Tan, Yannig Roth

The authors would like to extend their heartfelt appreciation to the following for their contribution in co-creating this white paper:

• Bernard Cova, French Academic and forward-thinking researcher in the field of marketing

• Bernhard Räber, Innovation Manager, Carlsberg Breweries• C.K. Prahalad, co-author of “The Future of Competition:

Co-creating unique value with customers”• David Skerrett, Head of Social and Mobile, Euro RSCG 4D• Doug Williams, analyst and co-creation expert at Forrester

Research• Eric Vernette, Professor of Marketing at the University of Toulouse

and Chair of the Center for Management Research• Francis Gouillart, Co-Author of “The Power of Co-Creation”• Frederique Covington-Corbett, Asia Pacific Central Marketing

Organization Lead, Microsoft• Gaurav Bhalla, CEO of Knowledge Kinetics, Chief Innovation

Officer at Passenger and author of “Collaboration and Co-Creation, New Platforms for Marketing Innovation”

• Jean-Fabrice Lebraty, Author and Professor at the Université Lyon 3

• Paul Sloane, Author of “A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing”

• Leonardo O’Grady, ASEAN Director of Integrated Marketing Communications of Coca-Cola

• Venkat Ramaswamy, cofounder of the Experience Co-Creation Partnership and co-author of “The Power of Co-Creation”


About eYeka eYeka is the global market leader in online consumer co-creation.

We are an online community of about 200,000 members from more than 94 countries. Our community attracts the most creative consumers, among the 1% of content creators on the web to participate in creative challenge for brands.

We leverage our community of creative consumers to help companies generate creative insights, unlock innovation opportunities and drive consumer engagement at a global level in a matter of weeks and within a confidential, IP protected environment.

To date, eYeka has worked with 40 out of the top 100 leading global brands (according to Interbrand’s 2011 ranking) such as Procter & Gamble, L’Oreal, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, Hyundai, Diageo and Microsoft.

For more on online co-creation, please visit www.eyeka.net.


Referencesi Jack Trout. “Peter Drucker on Marketing”. Forbes. http://www.forbes.com/2006/06/30/jack-trout-on-marketing-cx_jt_0703drucker.html

ii Jena McGregor, Michael Arndt, Robert Berner, Ian Rowley, Kenji Hall, Gail Edmondson, Steve Hamm, Moon Ihlwan, and Andy Reinhardt. “The World’s Most Innovative Companies”. Bloomberg BusinessWeek. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_17/b3981401.htm

iii The Boston Consulting Group. “Innovation 2010”. BCG. http://www.bcg.com/documents/file42620.pdf

iv Joe McKendrick. “ CIOs: speed to market is the only remaining competitive advantage”. ZDnet http://www.zdnet.com/blog/service-oriented/cios-speed-to-market-is-the-only-remaining-competitive-advantage/3888

v C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy. “CoCreation Experiences: The next practice in value creation”. Journal of interactive marketing (Summer 2004). 18, 3..

vi Doug Williams. “ Social Co-Creation: 9 Benefits And 6 Challenges For Using Social Technologies To Improve Your Products”. Forrester Blog. http://blogs.forrester.com/doug_williams/10-07-12-social_co_creation_9_benefits_and_6_challenges_using_social_technologies_improve_your_products

vii Eric Von Hippel, Susumu Ogawa and Jeroen P.J. De Jong. “The Age of the Consumer-Innovator”. MIT Sloan Management Review (2011).

viii Indre Liepuoniute. “Interview with Paul Sloane on Open Innovation”. Eyeka blog. http://en.eyeka.net/2011/06/paul_sloane_open_innovation/

ix Keith Oliver, Edourard Samakh and Peter Heckmann. “Rebuilding Lego, Brick by Brick”. Strategy+Business. http://www.strategy-business.com/article/07306

x Stefan Lindegaard. “You Gotta Love Lego – Crowdsourcing meets Open Innovation!”. 15inno. http://www.15inno.com/2011/09/08/yougottalovelego/ xi Jeffrey Grau. “How brands co-create value with customers”. Emarketer. http://www.emarketer.com/Report.aspx?code=emarketer_2000809

xii A.F. Lafley. “P&G’s Innovation Culture”. Strategy+Business. http://www.strategy-business.com/media/file/enews-08-28-08.pdf

xiii Venkat Ramaswamy. “Prof. Venkat Ramaswamy Part 7: Benefits of co-creation.mov”. Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWKax9oLL_E

xiv Boston Consulting Group, “Innovation 2010: A Return to Prominence – and the Emergence of a New World Order”. Bcg. http://www.bcg.com/documents/file42620.pdf

xv Doug Williams. “Co-Creation Contests: Q&A With The CEO Of eYeka”. Forrester Blog. http://blogs.forrester.com/doug_williams/11-09-20-co_creation_contests_qa_with_the_ceo_of_eyeka

xvi Michael I. Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely. “The ‘IKEA Effect’: When Labour Leads to Love”. Harvard Business School. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6671.html

xvii Danny Wong. “NikeID makes $100m+: Co-creation Isn’t Just a Trend”. The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/danny-wong/nikeid-makes-100m-co-crea_b_652214.html xviii Ray Wert. “Local Motors Rally Fighter: The First-Ever Creative Commons Car. Jalopnik. http://jalopnik.com/5398864/local-motors-rally-fighter-the-first+ever-creative-commons-car

xix Gary Gastelu. “Local Motors Going Global”. Fox News. http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2011/12/09/local-motors-going-global/

xx Gaurav Bhalla, “Collaboration and Co-creation: New Platforms for Marketing and Innovation” (New York: Springer Science+Business Media, 2010), 99-122

xxi Doug Williams. “How not to crowdcourse: Lessons learned from the Gap’s logo debacle”. Forrester Blog. http://blogs.forrester.com/dwilliams/10-10-15-how_not_to_crowdsource_lessons_learned_from_the_gaps_logo_debacle

xxii Todd Essig. “Managing The Psychological Bias Against Creativity”. Forbes. http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddessig/2011/09/06/managing-the-psychological-bias-against-creativity/

xxiii Venkat Ramaswamy and Francis Gouillart. “Building the Co-creative Enterprise”. Harvard Business Review. http://www.thepalladiumgroup.com/KnowledgeObjectRepository/Events%20-%20APAC%20and%20EMEA/Harvard%20Business%20Review%20Co-Creation%20and%20Innovation.pdf

xxiv Jakob Nielsen. “Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute”. Useit. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

xxv Eric Vernette. “Marketing: Imagine Better Product Concept with Lead-user or Emergent nature consumer?”. Consommateur Influenceur Influencer Consumer. http://consommateurinfluenceur.blogspot.com/2011/07/marketing-imagine-better-product.html

xxvi Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani. “How to Manage Outside Innovation”. MIT Sloan Management Review. http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/2009-summer/50413/how-to-manage-outside-innovation