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 company’s value chain, whether it be customers, other businesses, or suppliers.
Let’s examine some examples along the value chain.
Customers
There’s plenty of research showing that under the right circumstances and conditions customers and users can develop innovations that are both novels and have greater value for the users than what the company’s own developers come up with. Still, there hasn’t been an 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, because companies often take an overly dominating role, a more evenly distributed dialogue will lead to more beneficial outcomes in an innovation process.
Third, the collaborative process of face-to-face communication and openness in critical aspects of a project will facilitate the successful development of future services and products.
Finally, new offerings will be more successful if they account for needs that have been identified from user experiences.
The researchers conducted a survey among 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 prerequisites for participating actively in the company’s development processes. Better results were defined as enhanced creativity, improved user value, and a more successful launch.
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 saw 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?
Other Businesses
Here is a great business-to-business collaboration and co-creation example that was derived from a common objective of the sustainability of product containers. In 2009, The Coca-Cola Company created the Plant- bottle, 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 toward 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 contained; 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 reused 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 is a need and a will for 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.
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.
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 teamwork or continuous learning workshop?
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.
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:
Social proof is a concept that is as old as time. It has just begun to gain traction amongst online marketers as it explains a lot about the success of some online ventures and the failure of others. Look for social proof insights to succeed.
“Social
proof in a social media context is the theory that accounts that have high
follower numbers are trusted and followed more often”
It can be used to build trust in a social media environment for your business.
Social proof marketing is not new but often forgotten.
Here is a story to expound on the concept.
When engineers from Xerox PARC showed off their revolutionary new personal computer, the Alto, at the company’s global conference in 1977, senior executives weren’t particularly impressed. It just didn’t seem to be relevant to their jobs or their business.
Their wives, however, were transfixed. The reason for the disparity was that the executives saw a tool to automate secretarial work, which they considered to be a low-value activity.
The wives — many of whom had been secretaries — saw an entirely new world of possibility and, when Steve Jobs built the Macintosh-based on the Alto, everyone else saw it too. It’s easy to shake our heads and laugh at those shortsighted executives of the past, but we’d do ourselves a much greater service by realizing that we are not that different.
One of the earliest influences on human development is something we have all experienced…” peer pressure”. When one person within your group of peers pressures you into doing something, you’re not so likely to do it.
When many
people within your peer group are pressuring you to do something, you’re much
more likely to do it. This will escalate as more people join in.
The world of social media is, as you’d guess, much like the real world. In a social media context, social proof comes into play when web users see that a large number of people already follow, liked, shared, or commented on a piece of content. The increased activity is seen as something desirable to join in on.
Let’s take a
look at a more practical setting that we’re all familiar with… television. TV
shows have been using social proof for decades.
Watch a
sitcom with canned laughter, or laugh tracks, in the background. When you hear
those people laughing you’re more prone to laugh as well, increasing your
enjoyment of the show and the chance that you’ll watch it more often.
Examples of social proof
There are a
number of excellent examples of social proof. I’ll summarize them in point form
so you can quickly expand your knowledge here.:
Facebook Sponsored stories rapidly increase exposure which leads to more likes, and even crossovers with other social platforms due to their recognition – even algorithms recognize social proof.
A key guest blog on a relevantwebsite can increase sales better than an article in the New York Times, or a spot on CNN.
Yelp’s entire designs are centered around social proof – higher star ratings and better comments are a result of customerreviews. You’re more likely to go when more people have given it a high rating – just like peer pressure.
These are all more advanced forms of social proof. That most immediate one, and the one that people will see the most often and make the highest number of judgments on, is quite simply your follower numbers.
A low number
of Twitter followers leads to few people taking you seriously. Few subscribers
on YouTube leads to people thinking that your videos aren’t any good.
Here are some
points to consider:
Use
pictures to make your social proof real
Social media is the perfect platform for building social proof as it gives you a nearly limitless number of ways to attached pictures to your social proof. You can post photos with calls to action that breed comments that lead to social trust.
You can make comments, with the author’s permission, and post them to your website along with their photo.
Your blog posts can be filled with images of success enjoyed by your products or services.
Positive
social proof is better than negative
Negative social proof is the type of bullying behavior that we all resent. To look at the most basic examples in the Twitter images below, which are you more likely to click on?
You’ll never truly win people’s trust with negative social proof, just like those schoolyard bullies.
Money
is less persuasive than social proof
A study in
the Wall Street Journal showed that consumers were more
likely to make decisions based on social proof than the potential of saving
money.
In the study,
“Your neighbors are already doing it,” was more persuasive than “you’ll save
$54/month” when it came to influencing consumer behavior!
Your
best social proof may be the stories you tell
Statistics are great for bored, sorry, board meetings, but they are hardly ever going to truly interest people on social media. A compelling story, from a customer with a positive experience, could be a positive social proof that increases engagement more than any other thing you do.
People understand stories, people relate to stories, people are entertained by stories – statistics are work and are often ignored.
Influencers: The friendly online bullies
As discussed in the point form notes above, nothing quite equals the positivity of having a respected leader say something positive about your products or services.
Their behavior is able to “bully” their users with their positive influence. They’re much more likely to trust your product when someone they trust speaks of it positively.
Social media
is an absolute dream for this type of social proof – no more paying celebrities
for an expensive commercial, just cut right to the key influencers in your
industry!
Social
proof is more than an ego
Social proof is something as old as the human race itself, but social signals and social media have made it something tangible for modern marketers to use.
Remember the next time you make a push to increase your followers that you’re not stroking your own ego, you’re trying to show the next person that finds your account that you are worth their time and trust.
Spend
lots of time listening
Even if you already know what people are going to say, and even if there’s no way you can do what they want, start by listening. Being listened to is one of the things they want–that’s true of just about everyone.
Lots of listening.
That was one mistake I made on my first project: I had listened to people who wanted to volunteer but not to those who had volunteer jobs to offer. I assumed they’d be happy to have new volunteers, but I was wrong.
Ask lots
of questions
Not only because everyone wants to be listened to. Careful
questioning will help you determine what people really want, which is often
different from what they say they want. It will also tell you what they have to
offer.
Make a
human-to-human connection
Look for ways to connect that have nothing to do with the work at hand. Maybe they have children the same age as yours, or they live somewhere you’ve vacationed, or you share the same hobby.
Even if none of that’s true, you can still make a bit of a connection on the basis of universal experiences. For instance, right now a large portion of the United States is suffering through extreme winter weather.
Never
miss a chance to say thank you
Think hard about who’s helped you or put him- or herself
out, and make sure to thank him or her. That makes it much likelier he or she
will put him- or herself out again for you next time.
Give
praise every chance you get
Most of us never get enough praise for the things we work
hard to do. So if you want to influence someone, make sure to call out what he
or she has done well and how he or she has contributed to your organization or
your well-being. Do it in public if you can.
Always apologize
If you hate apologizing, get over it. An apology is one of the most powerful tools you have for winning people to your side. If a decision you made caused someone inconvenience or upset, an apology lets him or her know that you care.
That’s true even if you don’t regret the decision itself but only the harm it caused him or her.
Strive to
give people what they want
Obviously, this isn’t always an option. But if you can
figure out what people really want or need and make sure they get it, they’ll
be that much more likely to give you what you need from them.
Let
people save face
Sometimes you know that someone would be disastrously bad at a job he or she wants. Should you say so? Unless you’re giving him or her feedback with a view to his or her being qualified, later on, don’t.
You’re better off giving that person a more palatable out. For instance, you’ve already promised the job to someone else.
The bottom line
These are interesting facts many of which we already know, of course. They are not rocket science and shouldn’t be. This list of little things simply reminds us of what we have forgotten.
Then it is up to us to put these lessons (or reminders) into daily use through persistence and practice. Remember … Your learning trumps all!
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.
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.
Let’s examine some examples along the value
chain.
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, customer co-creation characterized by high-frequency communication will lead to increased product and market success.
Second, 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 the successful development of future services and products.
Finally, new offerings will be more successful if they account for needs that have been identified from user experiences.
The researchers
conducted a survey among 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.
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.
Listening carefully.
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 saw 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?
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- bottle, 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 contained; recyclable; weighs the same; has the same life-time; 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.
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.
The bottom line
So in the future, we will all need to learn how to collaborate with machines much as pilots do. In effect, rather than depend solely on our personal databases of experience, we will apply the sum total of human knowledge to our everyday and professional tasks.
Do
you have any comments, questions, or experiences on collaboration to share with
this community?
Are you devoting enough energy continually
improving your continuous learning?
More reading on learning from Digital
Spark Marketing’s Library:
The Nine Most Valuable Secrets of Writing Effective Copy
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
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
Like this short blog?Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.
