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 »

10 Insights from a Cambridge Open Innovation seminar – and particularly from Unilever’s approach

Open Innovation is hot. Companies, organizations and practitioners all over the world are doing it or experimenting with it. At the Institute for Manufacturing in Cambridge some 20 people gathered for a one-day exchange of experiences and viewpoints. Open Innovation managers were present from amongst others Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline, Akzo Nobel, Premier Foods, BAT – as well as people from IfM and NESTA – the UK 100 man-strong innovation agency.

This is what I have learned: Read the rest of this entry »

Rooftop Garden coming up…

Last week I visited the ‘Nationaal Sutainability Congres’ in The Hague. The largest sustainability event in our country where around 700 people came together to discuss, to learn and to inspire. A bit more of the first than the latter perhaps, but it’s very comforting to be in a room full of people working (and talking) on sustainable change!

Two main conclusions stayed with me after the conference.

The first was stated quite clear and shared by all people present: It’s time to stop talking and start doing. Which is kind of a dual message in a room full of people talking about the topic. But still.. 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’.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

The Next Level in Opening Up

When we would have to choose a ‘perfect’ client, it would be one that has the same ambition that we have: being out there on the frontier, doing stuff others haven’t done before. I’m pleased to announce that we have found one: Nokia, already keen on co-creation, is going to stretch its boundaries when it comes to opening up to the public.

We are currently involved in a co-creation project organised around the Maemo Summit. Maemo – for those of you who are as software-illiterate as I am –  is an open source Read the rest of this entry »

Douwe Egberts shows its ‘accessible-ness’ in a truly inspiring co-creation session

We love it when a plan comes together. We also love it when everybody is happy. And we love it when – again – the 5 principles of co-creation prove to be true.

Two weeks ago, I’d say a new standard was set for our Rooftop sessions when we held an expert co-creation session for Douwe Egberts. All the factors were accounted for: a very enthusiastic team from Douwe Egberts (a big thanks to all of you), a beautiful location (a new and very inspiring space in the portfolio of the Playing Circle) and, most importantly, an excellent team of experts (a big thanks to all of you, too) including fashion experts, trend analysts, product designers and marketing experts.

Douwe Egberts lived up to their recently acquired position of being one of the most accessible brands in the Netherlands. In the open atmosphere, everybody was eager to share their ideas, expertise and vision on the challenge at hand. The morning resulted in some very useful concepts, some of which I truly hope will be put into practice by Douwe Egberts. As for continuing development: one of the experts was so inspired that he actually started to work out some of the ideas (I’m very curious for those results) and Douwe Egberts is also in contact with another expert participant. A true feeling of co-creation, because lets face it: 99% of the best people do work outside of your company!

How did P&G do it? Hear it from A.G. Lafley himself

If there is one company that leads the way in Open Innovation and co-creation it is P&G. It’s former CEO calls himself the Chief Innovation Officer, inspires its employees, sits in innovation reviews and even wrote a book about it. P&G tells people that many products have been ‘proudly developed elsewhere’ and sets its target to 50% for innovations coming from outside the P&G business units. Connect & Develop is their program and it has been running since 2002. I find this pretty OK.

Much has been written and said about P&G, but hearing it from the horse’s mouth is powerful. Watch the interview with Lafley here or read my exerpt below. Or do both. Read the rest of this entry »

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?