Many organizations are in the early stages of realizing the ongoing power shifts that lead to co-creation, and will require strong executive leadership as this transformation occurs. Executives want to lead these efforts, but often ask “where do we start?”. The answer truly is “anywhere”, but the imperative is you need to effectively lead vs paying lip service.
It is not enough for middle and executive management to say that an organization needs to be collaborative. You need to be collaborative, visible and social inside and outside of your organization. A recent Harvard Business Review study cited lack of executive buy-in on collaboration as the leading reason for failure of collaboration initiatives.
“The problem was simple and obvious – because the top executives didn’t see collaboration and engagement as a good use of their time, employees quickly learned that they shouldn’t either.”
This is a failure of executives to lead by example, in the Leader Change Thyself mode. The underlying message is that collaboration, and the co-creation that follows, is based on trust. If employees do not truly believe (and seeing is believing) that executives are bought in on engaging their customers, employees won’t be stepping out to engage them either.
As we all know, trust is risky. It takes guts to allow customers, employees, and partners to co-create products and services for your brand. An even greater risk in today’s digital environment is to decide collaboration and co-creation are “not for us”. Being successful in this leap of trust starts and ends with executives being visible leaders of collaboration whether it be on internal social networks, external social networks, speaking at events or face to face with customers.
The science is settled. Culture changes happen fastest when executives buy in early, and often die a painful death when they do not.
So the questions for executives are not should we get started, but how ready are we? How quickly can we? How far do I need to step out of my comfort zone to lead this? Here are a few ways to go about this:
Monitor for organic customer co-creation
One way to find the places customers are already innovating is to employ social listening techniques. Listen not only for specific mentions of your brand, but mentions of competitors, topics and hashtags that are used in conversations around your product or service. This can allow you to join in on innovation that was happening without you, and help to identify brand champions in your customer base. You can then act as an amplifier for customers who are doing some of your best marketing for you.
Leverage what customers are already innovating on and build from that
Coke Freestyle is a recent example of an innovation platform coming full circle. Before Coca Cola’s Freestyle machines, many customers experimented with mixing flavors at soda fountains. Coke developed Freestyle to allow consumers to create their own beverages, with the purpose of discovering new flavors to offer as product lines. Coke removed the complexity of flavor innovation and customers provided ideation at scale. Recently, Coke announced a partnership with Keurig to release a tabletop version of the Freestyle machine. Going into each iteration of your own product and service development with customer innovation front of mind will allow you to tap into the scale of your customers’ ideas.
Open the channels of co-creation
Create communities for customers, partners and employees to collaboratively and openly innovate. This can be done by creating communities specifically for innovation. Salesforce.com is leading the way in this space with their Communities product, which gives organizations the ability to quickly create rich, collaboration-centric customer and partner communities. It can also be done by driving employees and partners to the places where customers are already innovating. Customers are self-organizing on Twitter and Instagram using hashtags or on Pinterest boards.
Dedicate organizational resources to co-creation
Companies like Google and Xerox are famous for allowing employees to dedicate percentages of their time to self-directed innovation projects. This is how some of our most common products, like post-it notes, have been created. These are formal programs and they are the easiest for us to define, especially as we pivot to a new culture. A change for the modern world are programs that encourage employees to dedicate a percentage of their time to exploring social communities online for innovative ideas customers are sharing. This is not just for product companies, and not only for those in product development. The true power of scale here comes from leveraging an entire organization’s social graph to turn your innovation team into one with thousands or millions of members.
Building this type of culture is well outside the familiar ways many executives have led their companies in the past. Leading in a digital, social world takes courage and a lot of personal and organizational self-reflection. There is no alternative though, and analysts are agreeing that ignoring this critical area of growth will put many businesses on life support in the next five years.
One way we see some leaders reaching for a delay in sentencing is in questions like “I understand what you are saying and I agree with it, but our company doesn’t sell to consumers. We’re B2B, so this doesn’t apply to us...right?”. This could not be more wrong, and in fact there are unique opportunities in the B2B space to leap way out in front of slower-moving competitors and steal market share. However, that window is closing quickly. These opportunities come along a few times in the life of each company, and this is one of them. In our next post, we will cover specific B2B scenarios for co-creation as a growth engine amongst partners.
