Fronteer in the news

Last week one of our partners, James Veenhoff, managed to make it to the news twice. Being invited to speak at the Amsterdam Y-Community, Charlotte van Drimmelen - society-reporter at ‘Het Parool’ – caught him explaining how the internet has been affecting the fashion industry since the past decade.  Next, James also drew the attention of the ‘Algemeen Dagblad‘ while presenting his particular view on entrepreneurship at The Enterprize Experience in Rotterdam.

Curious about our other public appearances? You can read all about it in our press-section

Share/Bookmark

Het publiek omdat het moet? (The audience because we have to?)

Being a consumer these days means you are allowed to give your opinion about everything. And not just allowed: it is highly valued, sometimes even expected and you can even become a part of a brand or product’s development process. Including the consumer is a trend that is also not missed in media-world. Only consumer is called the audience there. TV-shows and radio programs ever more often include them to become part of the show and let them co-decide on the content. But do they do it because they have to? Or because they want to? Or maybe just because they can? So… Het publiek omdat het moet? Read the rest of this entry »

Share/Bookmark

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 »

Share/Bookmark

House of Denim at Amsterdam Fashion Week

Making Plans

Our initiative to set up a ‘leading platform for high-grade and sustainable denim/jeans’ made some ‘giant steps’ yesterday thanks to an Expert Cocreation workshop and a seminar at A’dam Fashion Week. Read the rest of this entry »

Share/Bookmark

The Copenhagen Co-creation Manifesto

I have seldomly experienced such a rich event as the Copenhagen Co-creation summit a few weeks ago. The level of discussions and participants was fantastic. I needed weeks to digest all the information. I am back now. What was going on? The Danish Design Association had decided to take a bold step. Why not writing a Co-creation manifesto rather than beating around the bush all the time? Let’s nail it! But we didn’t. Of course not. When you have 30 people co-creating, the answer never comes immediately. It will take some time. Some more thinking. But: I was very happy with the definition my group came up with after the sessions:

- Co-creation unlocks collectivy creativity of people to create deeply relevant solutions -

It might sounds a bit dreamy, but so then the event was. We dreamt about a future world where co-creation would tap into the unlimited resource of collective global brainpower. New solutions would create far better worlds and would end the one-way consumption currently going on.

My conclusion after the event was: yes, co-creation is very difficult – and especially because of how organisations are structured right now – but it is a movement that cannot be stopped. There is no way back. We are all opening up and will refuse to close again.

Read the Manifesto and watch the great video.

Share/Bookmark

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 »

Share/Bookmark

Very succesful co-creation of a Business Modeling book

Here comes an inspiring story.

When researcher Alex Osterwalder was looking for a model for making business models, he could not find it. Or he could not find one he liked. None of them he found he could use across mutiple industries. So he decided to makes his own model together with a few other people. Enter Patrick. When Patrick van der Peijl found out about Alex’s project, he joined in and suggested to set up a community to make the book and model even stronger. The Hub was born.

What was so inspiring? When coming up with the idea to co-create abook on business modeling, they invented a new businss model with it. It was done before, but not with people actually paying for contributing. 400 People paid an average of 50 euros for being part of it, being able to suggest content, get the book first and be mentioned in the book. I thought it was a great examples of our 5 guiding principles of co-creation and presented my toughts on the official launch of the beta version of the book a few weeks ago in Amsterdam. 60 People showed up for a very well organised and inspiring day. The drawing is our model summarised by Paul den Dulk. The book launches later this year.

Anyone else with a new co-creation business model that works?

Share/Bookmark

Select the Very Best – or how social are the Swedes really?

I recently enjoyed being part of a great conference in Malmö, Sweden, called Business to Buttons. It was organised by a company called Inuse. The congress was mostly on usability and interaction design. I was invited to talk about co-creation. Something else for a change I guess. It was very interesting, especially from a cultural perspective.

We at Fronteer talk about co-creation strategies all the time, and the 5 guiding principles of it. The second principle is ‘Select the Very Best’, meaning selecting the best people to co-create with (the 1%) or being able to select the best ideas from many. When presenting the principles in a workshop I was confronted with the 12-strong crowd feedback. They found the second principle shocking, undemocratic and radical. But also they found it being liberating and daring. I touched a nerve there. In the land of almost socialism, how could you exclude people? Not listening to the masses? Not weighing everyones opinion? Even in Sweden you can, believe me. Everybody likes to work with the smartest people.

This anecdote illustrates the impact of our rigid selection process when it comes to finding people to co-create with. We at Fronteer spend much time and effort on it and it’s essential to the success of our work. When our clients venture out in social networking (who doesn’t?) we find them the experts and entrepeneurs. When our clients want to dig into old artisan industries, we find them the people that understand the tension fiueld between old and new industries.

For any challenge there is a 1% to crack it.

Share/Bookmark