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Master thesis Business Administration, Specialization: Strategy & Organization
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. T. Elfring
Joost de Boer
Student number 1517597
Involvement of internal and external parties
The co-­‐creation projects involved employees from different departments: IT, HR, controlling or marketing, and
of almost every business line in the organization – although the latter is dependent on the content of the
session. The interviewees do not see the need for changes in the way that different departments work together
in order to make co-­‐creation work, although one of the positive consequences of co-­‐creation is that it brings
together people from different departments. “But it should not be co-­‐creation that brings people together and
makes them talk. People should communicate more easily by themselves in the organization, but you do not
need co-­‐creation for that”, a manager says.
Considering which employees are involved from those departments another manager adds, “The department
itself appoints its delegates for the session. But more than often a department has people who I know are
more innovating than the ones that are delegated. So I think we need another way of selecting those people. It
has become some honorary thing to participate in co-­‐creation, while it should be about whom is the most
suited to participate.” Consensus among interviewees is found in that there should be clear criteria describing
who exactly should be involved in the sessions.
The externally involved parties consist mostly out of experts on specific fields. A business development
manager explains: “We involve people who might be of a certain added value to the project, but we already
determined what the concepts would look like before involving externals. We often involve clients or
companies at a much later stadium, while we perhaps could have involved them earlier”. Although some of
those experts might be working for a client of Company C, the interviewees feel that clients should be involved
more explicitly . The manager future ready workplaces explains: “We have never really involved our clients in a
co-­‐creation session” -­‐ it appeared that most of the time, experts and thought leaders are the ones that are
involved.
Used types of co-­‐creation
The interviewees indicated that Company C uses two types of co-­‐creation: the ‘Club of Experts’ and the
‘Coalition of Parties’. A global practice manager described this as follows: “We are somewhere at the boundary
between ‘Club of Experts’ and ‘Coalition of Parties’. We have a strong initiator role, but we also involve parties
from the outside to develop services together […] We are embedded in an eco-­‐system where partner
management gets increasingly important. It’s about interconnecting parties, and that also includes sharing
some of your IP (Intellectual Property).”
Where formally the most contact between Company C and its clients was based on offering solutions for a
single client, the ‘Club of Experts’ allows Company C to involve multiple clients, and connect them with external
experts and its own employees. This way, they are able to combine diverse customer experiences with the
expertise of experts from inside and outside the company. An example of these subjects might be what is
referred to as ‘the new working’ (Het Nieuwe Werken) – a concept that has increased in popularity in many
large organizations in the past few years. This exceeds the level of a single client, and the combined
perspectives that ‘Club of Experts’ tends to offer is an interesting solution to this. In addition, the Club of
Experts an also be used to leverage these combined perspectives towards suppliers.
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