RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP VISION DEVELOPMENT AND ETHICS

Social entrepreneurship and co-creation for sustainable business 237
in co-creation are perceived through the customers’ senses, the design of co-creation systems
(Kohler, Fueller, Matzler & Stieger, 2011) provided by brands becomes important for stimulating
sensory brand experiences.
Secondly, cognitive customer-brand engagement – stimulated through co-creation activities
– has the potential to stimulate the cognitive brand experiences of the co-creating participants.
The cognitive stimulations, which include learning and understanding of
product-related solutions, are important for co-creation participation (Nambisan & Baron 2007,
2009). Hollebeek (2011a) highlights the importance of the cognitive dimension of customerbrand
engagement. The cognitive challenges of co-creation activities stimulate customers’
cognitive engagement with the brand.
Prahalad and Krishnan (2008) claim that there is a fundamental transformation of business
underway, forged by digitalization, ubiquitous connectivity, and globalization, this transformation
will radically alter the very nature of the firm and how it creates value. No industry
is immune to this trend which will impact traditional industries such as education, insurance,
health care, automobiles, and footwear, as well as emerging industries such as video games,
search engines, and social networks. This transformation is built on two basic pillars:
1. Value is based on unique, personalized experiences of consumers. Firms have to learn
to focus on one consumer and her experience at a time, even if they serve 100 million consumers.
The focus is on the centrality of the individual.
2. No firm is big enough in scope and size to satisfy the experiences of one consumer at
a time. All firms will access resources from a wide variety of other big and small firms – a
global ecosystem. The focus is on access to resources, not ownership of resources.
The key elements of the required business transformation are five:
1. Value is shifting from products to solutions to experiences. In this new world B2B (business-to-business)
and B2C (business-to-client) will converge.
2. No company has all the resources it needs to create unique personalized experiences.
All companies will therefore have to access talent, components, products, and services from
the best source.
3. Internal management systems can become an impediment. Flexible systems are a prerequisite
and must be developed.
4. Resources in the ecosystem must be continually configured.
5. Specific models must be developed to enable organizations to focus on one consumer
from the millions.
There is also a need to develop new principles for innovation. The primary principle is
that the individual is “at the heart of experience”. If the locus of value is shifting from products
and services to experience, then, almost by definition, value creation must focus on the
individual consumer. This principle goes beyond mass customization, as it is about misunderstanding
the behavior, needs and skills of individual consumers and co-creating with them a
value proposition that is unique to them. Another characteristic of this principle is flexibility.
Part of the flexibility is the ability to reconfigure resources on the fly. The focus is on continuity
in balancing the load and the nature of the task with appropriate resources to maximize
the experience of customers. Also, the level of quality must be high – consumers will not accept
poor quality, nor will they accept a service that is not of “good” value. Furthermore, the prod-