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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. 43
Master thesis Business Administration, Specialization: Strategy & Organization Supervisor: Prof. Dr. T. Elfring Joost de Boer Student number 1517597 In addition, the combination of the ‘Club of Experts’ and the ‘Coalition of Parties’ does not appear to be coincidental. Both types use a select group of participants, but differ on the ownership of the generated content. Company C has “changed its direction toward the role of aggregator”, a manager recalls, emphasizing the importance of cooperation with suppliers and other companies. Where the ownership of generated content with the ‘Club of Expert’ is assigned to Company C, the ‘Coalition of Parties’ presumes that the ownership is shared between parties. This allows building important partnerships, as a vertical market manager explains: “We have, for instance, previously worked together with banks, seeking for opportunities to reinforce one other”. Figure 4.5 illustrates how the involvement of internal and external parties contributed to different types of co-‐creation for different purposes. Figure 4.5 | Company C: purpose, scope, involved parties and types of co-creation Crowd of People: not used Community of Kindred Spirits: not used Openness Club of Experts: Purpose: Idea generation Scope: Focussed, internally prepared Internal: IT, HR, Controlling, Marketing, relevant departments External: Experts, thought leaders Coalition of Parties: Purpose: Seeking new partnerships/alliances Scope: Open, explorative Internal: Relevant departments (higher management) External: Other organizations Ownership Co-‐creation in the NPD-‐Process Before involving external parties in the idea generation phase, a group of employees of Company C were brought together to identify a set of themes that would function as the scope of the co-‐creation session. So, before involving any external participants at all, certain criteria for products or service to be generated were set already. In the case of the Club of Experts, the involved externals were invited to generate new ideas and concepts that would fit within these themes; the Coalition of Parties tended to be used somewhat more to explore possibilities of partnerships between organizations and are therefore less easily directed to a specific NPD-‐phase. A part of the selection of generated ideas is partially already done before the actual co-‐creation session has started, when employees of Company C determine a number of themes that will be used in the co-‐creation sessions itself: “And that way, we already send our stakeholders in a certain direction. That way, we will never generate ideas that are completely out of the box. Why send a party off with a solution, while there are multiple solutions?” Often co-‐creation sessions in Company C have often been framed in a way that the 44
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