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 & Sustainability, a perfect match

“Organisations call out for more open innovation to stimulate sustainability” was one of the messages during the World Economic Forum in Switzerland last week. Well, we couldn’t agree more.

During the forum, 10 leading companies among which Nike, Creative Commons and Best Buy announced the launch of Green XChange, a new collaborative project that can change the rules of the game. It’s a platform allowing companies to share their knowledge (IP), co-create and accelerate the development of innovative solutions for sustainability issues.

As we also believe in accelerating the innovation process through co-creation and believe in the value of co-creation for sustainable innovation, Fronteer Strategy and Green Inc have combined strengths and developed Rooftop Garden. Read the rest of this entry »

Cocreation at Nokia Maemo Summit

Standing on each-others’ shoulders

Maemo – at the risk of stating the obvious -is Nokia’s Linux-based operating system, developed by a global community of open source programmers and enthusiasts. The Maemo community is independent from Nokia and is run by its own peer-elected council. All future high-end Nokia devices (Like the new N900 out soon) will run on Maemo, which means that users will be able to program, develop and share applications freely: a great perspective!

This weekend, the Maemo community organised its third annual conference at Amsterdam’s Westergasfabriek. Parallel to the ‘regular’ conference program, Fronteer Strategy was asked to develop a co-creative development process on the topic of ‘Creativity on the Move’.

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LOVE FOR DENIM

Love for Denim. And…Almere ?

One of our current projects combines just about all my professional fields of interest, as well as one of my strongest personal passions. I’m as surprised as anyone to find two of its main components to be ‘the City of Almere’ (a relatively new town to the right of Amsterdam) and ‘sustainability’.

Due to my former role as program director of Amsterdam International Fashion Week, i’m regularly asked to take part in discussions on economic & regional policy, especially relating to the development of creative industries and fashion business. During one of such discussions with the ambitious Economic Affairs team from the City of Almere, we got talking about one of my favourite topics : Jeans. Read the rest of this entry »

Co-creation Dialogue Sessions in Los Angeles and Amsterdam

The last weeks we have been working on a project in Los Angeles and Amsterdam. The project aim was to find the right positioning of new products to be introduced by our client. Instead of creating products from scratch or building on client’s concepts – as we normally do in co-creation sessions – this time we needed to figure out the reason for being of a portfolio of products. Since such a task is not to be done with an average set of consumers, we recruited heavily on creative, outspoken, constructive, critical and passionate users of our client’s products. We found them. The differences between LA and Dutch consumers were abundent, but both worlds were not too far apart though. People from LA are VERY talkative though and like to share what they love (photo: Apple, Prius and Obama).

A few things I would like mention about Los Angeles’ and Amsterdam’ sessions:

- People feel truly honoured to be part of a strategic product development process
- When clients open up, consumers open up (we do not use one-way mirrors..)
- You get the best results when you invite the best people
- You need brand advocates and competitors’ fans in the mix
- Consumers can be far more passionate about a brand than clients could ever imagine…

These findings are in line with what we have experienced in recent other projects. We stick to our own rules: inspire, select, connect, share and continue.

Co-creating for BNR Newsradio

Some time ago we took part in a conference called ‘The CoCreation Event’ held at the university of Eindhoven. Keynote speakers included Johan Sanders, innovation chief at Dutch Coffe brand Douwe Egberts and Martijn Staal of TNO, and I took part in a panel discussion about the question ‘Is Cocreation a Hype?’, which was fun.

Together with about 15 other co-creation specialists, we presented ourselves to around 500 attendants during a ‘market’-style mingle session, followed by break-out workshops. Rather than just talk about ourselves, we chose to ‘practice what we preach’ by spending both our time on the ‘market’ and in our break-out session on a cocreation topic.

We chose a topic close to any businessperson on the move: BNR Newsradio, the semi-quirky Dutch business & news radio station owned by the Dutch Financial Times. Read the rest of this entry »

Creative Company Conference 2009 – Amsterdam

This week, I visited the Creative Company Conference in Amsterdam. A number of speakers was very interesting, including mister Amnon Levav of the Israeli firm Innovation SIT who spoke inspiringly about how innovation is often stimulated through challenges or discomfort, and usually found at the end of the path of MOST resistance. His analysis of structural, functional and relational ‘fixedness’ traps was a minor breakthrough to me.

The undisputed highlight of the day however was Sir Ken Robinson, who lectured about the importance of changing the way we look at education, chilling with Paul McCartney and his wife’s love of Elvis. I intend to read his new book “The Element” soon.

All in all, the event was fun, and I left inspired. I feel that in this day & age however, a conference like this should have wi-fi. Interestingly, there were rumors of a TedX event to be organised in Amsterdam soon. Let’s hope we can get a program together that deserves the ‘accolades of Ted-ness’.

Applause to Delft University for practicing what we preach!

That co-creation is hot right now, we already know. And that many companies are looking for ways to implement it… also no hot news. But sitting still will not lead you in any new direction either. Some advice? Just do it! It doesn’t have to be hard or complicated. Invite some people who know more or different things than you do and voilà: fresh input!

A good example was presented to me yesterday, when we were invited at Read the rest of this entry »

Co-creation with nature

‘Life can offer 3.8 billion years of well-adapted technology, perhaps we can learn something from it’…

This quote stuck with me after listening to Dayna Baumeister, co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild. She spoke at the TU Delft Alumni Symposium yesterday where we attended her exciting lecture ‘Innovation, Inspired by Nature’.

And did nature inspire us!   Read the rest of this entry »

24th June: the first Dutch Co-Creation Event

If you are currently working on improving your product- or service development, marketing, communication, online market-research or innovation strategy, prepare to travel ‘south of the rivers’ in a couple of weeks! But also if you are a designer, marketeer, innovation-consultant or CEO, you will not regret a trip to Eindhoven on the 24th of June.

Why?

Because then the first Dutch Co-Creation Event will take place on the High Tech Campus. Read the rest of this entry »