Co-creation prerequisites: ‘Embrace a stranger as one’s own’

Successful co-creation doesn’t come cheap. It requieres a number of steps to deserve the trust, energy and ideas of a group or a person. One of the most important steps is to embrace a group of strangers as if you have known them for years and show that you trust them completely. For a while now, I have been looking for a visual or movie that depicts this step and I have found it. Read the rest of this entry »

Is empathy the new frontier in business?

On July 9^th we held a workshop on business empathy with 4 major Dutch companies, all leaders in their category: banking, supermarkets, rice and cable companies.

This workshop was part of the Dutch Empathy Monitor 2010, conducted by Ruigrok | Netpanel in cooperation with Fronteer Strategy. One of the interesting outcomes: there is a positive correlation between empathy and attractiveness.

But how can these four large brands be empathic while serving literally all Dutch consumers between the four of them? How can they understand all these 17 million consumers? The truth is, they can’t. But they can at least start trying.

These are some of the brand challenges that came up during the workshop:

- How can a commodity- or technical brand be empathic?
- Is empathy the reason why people still write us real letters?
- Should we deal with all the millions of expanding on-line touchpoints our brand has?

Read the rest of this entry »

Co-Creation Workshop: Business Model Generation

Defining and choosing the right business model is one of the main problems when starting a new business or launching a new product / service. But also a change in market circumstances can force you to reconsider your current business model. Fronteer Strategy identified this need amongst many of our close contacts and decided to act upon this increasing need.

On Tuesday July 6th, a diverse audience of entrepreneurs, consultants and investors assembled in Amsterdam for an inspirational workshop for the Business Model Generation facilitated by Fronteer Strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

The Empathy Monitor 2010 – Results and Reactions

Fronteer Strategy and Ruigrok Netpanel have launched the Dutch Empathie Monitor – all results can be found on the website. It ranks major Dutch brands on perceived empathy, attractiveness, innovativeness and approachability levels. The research has been done with 1700 Dutch people 18+. Why have we done this? We believe empathy (the awareness and understanding of other people’s feelings and motives) will be one of the big business drivers of the future. All brand touchpoints are moments of truth, brand exposure, innovation opportunities and moments where you can show empathy. And – to our surprise – a Swedish brand has won. IKEA is leading the pack. In the top-3 we see Albert Heijn, the leading Dutch supermarket, and Bol.com, the little Dutch brother of Amazon.

We ate now almost a week after the launch and the reactions have been great. People have recognised the importance of empathy. Publications and debates online and lively Twitter exchanges are for us confirmations that empathy has value. Also, the monitor has been published on the ‘Ranking the Brands‘ site. The next step for us now is to help clients to understand empathy and what it means for their businesses. How do you drive empathy? How do you develop a touchpoints strategy? How can we innovate at all touchpoints? Those are questions we like to answer.

Feel free to contact us for more information.

How can violin players solve sustainability issues?

What makes a good co-creation expert? Let’s start with: when can you be called an expert? When you have a degree in a certain subject? Or when you devoted your whole life to another subject?

The Cambridge dictionary states it as follows:

expert noun /ˈek.spɜːt//-spɝːt/ [C]

a person with a high level of knowledge or skill; a specialist

And what about a co-creation expert? Being the Head of Experts at Fronteer Strategy, I like to add something to the above. Yes, a co-creation expert is someone with a high level of knowledge or a certain skill, but it also is someone who is creative, who likes to work with other people and share ideas. Someone who is passionate about his or her occupation, line of business, or just a certain topic in general. Or someone that can shine a different light on a certain subject. First and foremost, a co-creation expert likes to inspire and be inspired. And the expert is very good at what he does, and has a proven track record. Read the rest of this entry »

10 Green Rules when it comes to sustainable strategies

Last month I had the great pleasure of presenting our vision on sustainability & co-creation at an event organised by Brand New Design – one of the leading packaging design agencies in The Netherlands. Brand New had gathered 101 inspiring examples of sustainable packaging from around the world. The 101 examples will travel Europe the coming months and hopefully will be available in a book later this year. Adformatie also covered the event (in Dutch). Here is the PDF.

We believe that the sustainability challenge is too big and too complex for anyone to tackle alone. There is no right or wrong, there are merely data points, opinions, visions and personal experiences. What is important then for any company or brand is to work together with experts, partners, suppliers and customers to find out how sustainability relates to their brand promise and business models.

The presentation that I gave is available on SlideShare. In it we make a case for co-creation being a method to create sustainable strategies. Our Rooftop Garden sustainable co-creation tool would be an example of that. Enjoy our presentation and please give us your feedback.

And for those of you who want instant satisfaction: read the rest of this entry for the 10 Green Rules

Read the rest of this entry »

Liever Lassie : Campaign Co-creation

Ever thought of co-creating your campaign? Well, it pays off! A few months ago we’ve had an inspiring session with the Dutch leading rice brand Lassie. Experts of all kinds collaborated, from famous Dutch cooks, to food- and packaging experts and from to imaginative advertising guys, to magazine-editors.

Our Rooftop method helped the participants to think outside the box, from a consumer perspective. Quite an extensive and fruitful mix of creative brains happen to deliver great results. We knew that, but often we have to deal with long term value and cannot share results on the short term. Now we can.

Watch the new commercial here!

Read the rest of this entry »

There are 4 competitive Co-creation strategies. What’s yours?

If you want to know whether you can jump right into co-creation or whether you’d rather wait a bit: do our test. It is very simple. You basically have to answer two questions:

- Is my company, brand or organisation experienced in co-creation or any form of open innovation?

- Is my industry known to co-creation or any form of open innovation?

The results are below > What should you do? Read the rest of this entry »

PINC11 – Rocking Outside the Box

This week i had the pleasure of being invited to PINC, a TED-like conference about People, Ideas, Nature and Creativity (thanks to COO at Getronics) organised in Zeist, The Netherlands. I had spoken to many PINC devotees in the past years but never been able to attend.

The range of speakers was very stimulating: lectures on wireless electricity (in shops from next year, apparently!), A-frame holiday homes (i want one), images from the microcosm (strange beauty) and the history of the entire world in just over 20 minutes. Truly inspiring.

But the most refreshing example of ‘thinking outside the box’ i’d heard in a long time came from celebrity comedian/conferencier Freek de Jonge. His brilliance came to life through a song, which he accompanied on an electric guitar. Nothing special at first glance… until he told us he’d only been playing for one year. Read the rest of this entry »

The future of online (innovation) – The Next Web 2010

More and more companies feel that the internet is heavily affecting the way they do business. The whole world is upside down, one person with a positive or negative experience of your product / service can mobilize communities in a flash against or in favor of your business. And the ever increasing snowball of information makes online reputation management a day time job.. At least that’s how it seems.

However, when using the right tools and strategies the internet can actually empower innovation, improve customer loyalty and hand pick all the information you need to know. These tools are already available, but of course we are interested in the tools of the future and these were presented at The Next Web Read the rest of this entry »