Ken Sawyer once said: Collaboration drives creativity because innovation always emerges from a series of sparks … never a single flash of insight. Collaboration and co-creation secrets? Well, maybe just not well known.
We are great believers that collaboration and co-creation among businesses and between companies and customers hold much promise for future growth.
There is an opportunity for collaboration and co-creation all along a companies’ value chain, whether it be customers, other businesses or suppliers.
Let’s examine some examples along the value chain.
Collaboration … working with customers
There’s plenty of research showing that under the right circumstances and conditions customers and users can develop innovations which are both novel and have greater value for the users that what the company’s own developers come up with.
Still, there hasn’t been overwhelming agreement on how best to get it done.
A recent study by Anders Gustafsson at BI Norwegian Business School and Karlstad University in Sweden demonstrates that profitable co-creation with customers centers on the nature of the communication and interaction between the company and its customers.
The researchers were after answers to two questions: How should companies communicate with their customers? When is it profitable to listen to what they say?
They tested four hypotheses:
First, that customer co-creation characterized by high-frequency communication will lead to increased product and market success.
Second, that because companies often take an overly dominating role, a more evenly distributed dialogue will lead to more beneficial outcomes of an innovation process.
Third, that collaborative process of face-to-face communication and openness in critical aspects of a project will facilitate successful development of future services and products.
Finally, that new offerings will be more successful if they account for needs that have been identified from user experiences.
The researchers conducted a survey of 334 managers who all had experience with innovation to create new products and services. They selected 284 real development projects that they divided into two main groups:
207 of the projects dealt with minor improvements of products or services, while the remaining 77 projects dealt with the development of radically new products or services not previously known to the market.
The study confirms that companies can achieve better results in new product development if customers are given the right pre-requisites for participating actively in the company’s development processes. Better results were defined as enhanced creativity, improved user value, and a more successful launch.
Related post: 10 Extraordinary Ways for Learning to Learn
Awesome listening.
Collaboration in the workplace … listening
No big surprise here. For minor improvements to products and services, it is advantageous to talk frequently with the customers and have two-way communication between the company and customers.
The researchers also saw that it’s wise to listen carefully to what the customers actually said. Users will often know better what is needed to make them even more satisfied with products and services.
Customers will also be able to tell you what types of improvements they are willing to pay for.
When not to listen
When a company aims to develop a product or service entirely new to the market, on the other hand, you should not listen too much to the customers’ specific proposals.
The researchers say that companies that listened too much to what customers said were less successful with radical innovations than those which placed less emphasis on the contents of conversations.
“The customers base themselves to a great extent on previous experiences. The really radical solutions are difficult to imagine in advance based on experiences with current products,”Gustafsson points out.
Sounds a bit like Henry Ford’s famous century-old quote:“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” And no survey was needed on that thought, was there?
Collaboration examples … other Businesses
Here is a great business to business collaboration and co-creation example that was derived from a common objective of sustainability of product containers. In 2009, The Coca-Cola Company created the Plant- BottleTM, a plastic bottle partially manufactured (30%) with plant-derived materials (like sugar cane and molasses) and byproducts of sugar production in Brazil.
These plants were chosen based on environmental criteria to ensure that they do not interfere with local crops. The remaining 70% of each bottle is made with materials derived from fossil fuels, such as petroleum.
The Coca-Cola Company is now striving to manufacture a bottle made of 100% plant-derived materials and plant residues. In fact, they have already developed a prototype, and are now collaborating with Heinz to use their bottling factory. The Coca-Cola Company has planned to invest $150 million in Plant BottleTM, to develop the next generation of technology for extracting sugar from plant residues such as plant stems, tree bark, and fruit peel.
It is also working to make the new container water and carbon neutral. Heinz has made a major investment in the project, although the company has not revealed any details. It is hoping to take a step further towards its own goal of reducing emissions, waste and energy consumption by 20% by 2015.
Heinz had already used 120 million PlantBottlesTM in the USA in 2011. The material in these new containers shares many properties with that of the original plastic (PET): it is amenable to carbonation of the liquid container; recyclable; weighs the same; has the same lifetime; shares the same appearance and chemical composition; and is suitable for water, juice and carbonated beverages.
The bottle is 100% recyclable: the resulting byproducts can be re-used to manufacture more bottles or to make other products, such as furniture or clothing. More opportunities for collaboration and co-creation. For example, The Coca-Cola Company and furniture maker Emeco have established a smart collaboration to manufacture the Emeco 111 Navy Chair, a chair made of 111 recycled bottles.
Where there are a need and a will of partner collaboration, companies will find a way.
Suppliers
Is growing the pie via supplier collaboration an impossible task? No, quite the opposite. But you have to collaborate more upfront on strategies. And finding an equally willing partner.
Consider one example. Over the last five years, Jimmy Dean’s has expanded its frame of reference beyond just breakfast sausage into convenient breakfast meals that provide longer lasting energy. A great collaboration with its food manufacturer.
This niche partnership delivers a breakfast like what you’d get at a fast-food restaurant with sausage at its center. In that time, Jimmy Dean’s tripled its frozen breakfast sales with triple-digit millions in growth. But the business category overall grew from $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion, with Jimmy Dean’s driving nearly two-thirds of all the growth.
It’s a great example of what can happen when companies and their supplier bases stop fighting over splitting the pie and instead find a way to increase the share. In this case, the growth was stealing sales that might otherwise have gone to fast food establishments.
We offer these additional collaboration or co-creation recommendations that are independent of the partner type you are collaborating with (from the Art of Innovation by Tom Kelly):
Shoot the bad ideas first
Study the things you know won’t work. They will help you understand why they don’t work and give you more alternative options.
Have a bias for action
Move to implement experimentation with your best ideas as soon as possible. The mere process of actualizing will create more ideas and thoughts on solutions.
Use lots of media
Try as many types of media as possible to explore your prototype options. Examples include drawings, graphics, foam … any means to learn quickly.
Iterate often
Create short feedback loops. Don’t go long without experimenting and testing your ideas.
Is this your design?
Expect your design to change
Rarely does your first prototype become your final design?
Remember this, if you are as impatient as I am, look to your colleagues, your friends, your customers, other businesses, and to suppliers to challenge you to reach new heights. Tap into the parts of your brain you may not use every day. The parts of your brain you may not even realize you can tap into.
Most of all, reach out to others to collaborate. The sum of group collaboration is always greater than the work of each individual.
Do you have any comments, questions, or experiences on collaboration to share with this community?
It’s up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with collaboration efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your creativity, innovation, and ideas?
Do you have a lesson about making your creativity better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff ’s teamwork, collaboration, and learning? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a teamwork or continuous learning workshop?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
The Nine Most Valuable Secrets of Writing Effective Copy
How Good Is your Learning from Failure?
10 Extraordinary Ways for Learning to Learn
Continuous Learning Holds the Keys to Your Future Success
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How many times in your business career have you been in an organization where real energy was expended to building collaboration and sharing? How successful were these efforts? Building collaboration in the workplace is not an easy job, is it? But we’d all agree that the payoffs certainly outweigh the efforts, wouldn’t we?
The notion of a lone genius has always been a myth. As W. Brian Arthur observed in The Nature of Technology, innovations are combinations, so it is unlikely that anyone ever has all the pieces to the puzzle. Even Steve Jobs depended on a small circle of loyalists. Today, however, the ability to collaborate is becoming a key competitive advantage.
Over the years in my career, I’ve had the good fortune of being exposed to many smart people and worked as part of many teams trying to build collaboration and sharing. It never ceases to amaze me how just a few moments of discussion, or sitting and listening to well-thought-out debates, can open your mind to ideas you can’t believe you didn’t think of on your own.
In General Stanley McChrystal’s efforts to transform the Special Forces in Iraq, he ran into challenges trying to get diverse teams to work together. Yet he saw that by building connections between units he could build a “team of teams” that was able to effectively coordinate action. In One Mission, his aide-de-camp, Chris Fussell, describes two strategies used to achieve this effect.
The first was to leverage high-performing liaison officers to build personal connections among disparate units. The second, called the “O&I” forum, was a daily video conference that was designed to create informal connections between officers at an “operational cadence.” Since leaving the military, McChrystal and Fussell have had similar success implementing these strategies in civilian organizations at their consulting group.
Creative convergence depends on group collaboration … how well do you work in groups?
I have always found the wisdom of others to be something of a gift: free of charge, no limit to its value. No limits to its value because these pearls of wisdom can be connected to some of your ideas to produce something greater than what you might have created on your own.
For example, consider this example. It takes a great entrepreneur with the vision to start a business, but it requires strong leadership collaboration skills and the collaboration of many people to make it a success.
Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals. Note that collaboration is NOT cooperation … it is more than the intersection of common goals, but a collective determination to reach an identical objective by sharing knowledge, learning, and building consensus.
Collaboration is an attribute that cuts across many businesses and business processes. We need to make it an intentional process and cultivate it into the team’s culture.
We recently came across an interesting IBM Report: Charting the Social Universe.
In an atmosphere where your value is defined by your ability to share your expertise rather than safeguard it, collaboration is crucial. In this Center for Applied Insights study, Charting the Social Universe, respondents were asked how they defined the term “social business.”
Their response? It’s all about collaboration: 74 percent defined a social business as one that uses social technology to foster collaboration among customers, employees and partners.
Collaboration doesn’t happen overnight. To better understand organizations’ approaches to adopting social, they were asked which social capabilities they had deployed, and for what business purposes. From these questions, four important ideas were derived:
Drive both internal and external collaboration
Build and educate employees
Gain customer insights and engage them
Use what you learned to improve business processes
Examples of collaboration in the workplace.
Let’s examine driving internal and external collaboration, which was the most common entry point for organizations. This idea includes social capabilities such as collaborative apps, enterprise social networks, and social media marketing. The study outlines some additional key findings, but here are the insights from organizations focused on driving internal and external collaboration:
Because this ambition is often a company’s entry point into social, many are still in a relatively immature phase:
43 percent of respondents say they’re in the early stages of adopting these types of capabilities. But that will soon change as 53 percent say they’ll have an enterprise-wide strategy for these capabilities in the next two to three years.
69 percent have no formal qualitative metrics to assess the effectiveness of these social capabilities. Instead, they have a general, informal sense of their performance. But, interestingly, their #1 concern when deploying these capabilities is uncertainty in the return on investment.
It’s all about encouragement:
What was their #1 catalyst for deploying these capabilities? 39 percent say employee evangelists championed the use of these social capabilities.
52 percent say the best way to drive adoption of these capabilities internally is a regular encouragement.
And two wildcards jumped out to the study team:
54 percent have a published set of guidelines for these capabilities.
For social media marketing, Facebook is most commonly used, followed by Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.
Are you looking to drive internal and external collaboration within your organization? Want your employees to share their unique knowledge and expertise instead of keeping it to themselves?
Here are a few tips you need to consider:
Develop formal metrics to prove the value of your social efforts.
Successful collaboration in the workplace.
Pursue an enterprise social strategy.
Identify employee evangelists to spread the word about social capabilities.
Focus on employee adoption – keep encouraging them to use social, and remind them why.
The bottom line
Creative ideas on how to build collaborative teams must include exploring, imagining, experimenting, and learning with others. Most of all, it requires reaching out to others to collaborate. The sum of group collaboration is always greater than the work of each individual.
The notion of a lone genius has always been a myth. As W. Brian Arthur observed in The Nature of Technology, innovations are combinations, so it is unlikely that anyone ever has all the pieces to the puzzle. Even Steve Jobs depended on a small circle of loyalists. Today, however, the ability to collaborate is becoming a key competitive advantage.
So how do you focus and motivate a group of individuals to share their knowledge and collaborate as a team?
What do you believe is a fundamental requirement to support innovation in a team environment? We believe collaboration and teamwork are fundamental to good innovation sessions and we work hard in our workshops to build these qualities.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to continually improving your continuous learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More leadership material from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
