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. They recently launched a ‘community’ platform called ‘De Vrienden van BNR’ (probably doens’t require translation…) but we got the impression that they don’t really know what to do with it, since all they have is a Linked-In chatgroup. Because i’ve been listening to BNR for years (and one of my friends is a columnist there) we decided to point our attention in their direction. So our question for the day was: “How can BNR optimally engage their ‘Vrienden’ network?”

We approached the topic from 2 directions. Firstly, we used ‘Crowd Sourcing’ to leverage the collective creativity of the Cocreation Event community. We invited all the congress attendants to suggest ideas and answers, by adding ‘speech bubbles’ to the poster with our question on it. Around 20 suggestions were made in the course of the day.

Then, during the afternoon break-out session, we organised a pressure-cooker style Rooftop session. Squeezing our tried-and-true 8-hour methodology into a 1-hour breakout session was a gamble. Some valuable insights and ideas came out, but all in all we decided afterwards that it required cutting one or two corners too many. Time, session set-up, venue, participants… it’s a precise cocktail. Our aim was to show participants what Rooftop is like from the inside, rather than just talk about it; It was fun to do, but probably a one-off.

Nevertheless, we came up with a number of very interesting ideas for BNR and the further development of their Friends network. We recently presented our approach and session outcomes to Rens de Jong, one of the senior editors, and the BNR marketing team. They were very interested; i won’t add too much detail about the specific ideas we discussed just yet, so that they have time to move first. In the spirit of ‘open source’ though, it’s fair to indicate that the most valuable concepts we developed were centered around three topics. First of all, using listeners on the move as potential eye-witness reporters (“Anyone near the big fire in Zaanstad? please call”) was some low-hanging fruit. Then there were a number of concepts that used the network as a source of content for shows, background on news topics and other information, as well as suggestions of and contacts to potential interviewees. Lastly, the profiles of the listeners themselves might be interesting to advertisers or headhunters – sharing such information to BNR might provide them with an asset to build business.

So all in all it was a very valuable way to spend a day; all parties concerned had a learning experience as well as some good ideas and some fun.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to the crowdsourcing and the breakout session; and hey Rens… keep us updated on what you intend to do with your Vrienden platform.

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