When does a firm benefit from customer co-creation?
The leading journal of product innovation, JPIM, has a cool YouTube channel to view short summaries of selected articles on innovation. I strongly recommend checking it every couple months for new posted videos. Even if, like me, you read the journal cover-to-cover every issue, it is interesting to see how the authors portray their research via video.
Readers of a blog originally titled “Service Co-creation” will undoubtedly be interested in this video – which asks when does a firm benefit from customer co-creation. The authors found that benefits from customer involvement vary based on whether the innovation is:
- Incremental or Radical, and
- Utilitarian or hedonic.
Watch the video to get the insights:
This full article is featured in the July issue of JPIM.
Again the video link is here.
ProfessorGary on Innovation and Marketing 
I think, as a small business doing bespoke stuff for tech-savvy and innovative clients you do this anyway … although you might not use grand scientific language as in the video 😉 It is just tinkering, changing your ‘products’ or ‘services’ basically with every new client’s request – an organic process.
The difference to the theories in the video is that as a very small business without market research etc. you do it on the job and as you go, without strategic planning.
So thanks for this: The next time I have to listed again to a ‘business expert’s’ talk about having to standardize your products and services to provide packaged stuff to a larger number of consumers – I will simply say we are innovative, and our clients are too, so we do co-development all the time 🙂
And you can use ALL of the cool innovation buzzwords: “lean startup,” “iterative,” “customer co-creation,” and “flexible by design.” 😎
As well as “radical,” “hedonic” and especially “evolutionary!”