Dr Nick Coates Nick oversees Promise's research activities and has a particular interest in the creative industries, education and the arts, language and semiotics and cross-cultural research. Nick led Promise's work with LSE Enterprise to produce a report on the history, application and benefits of co-creation. Read the full biography here.

Co-creation: evolution or revolution?

....eh tell us what you think

23rd June, 2011

Co-creation’s an idea that has finally arrived in the mainstream. Surveys from the likes of IBM have highlighted co-creation as a key objective for businesses. Co-creation is appearing in conference titles as well as in individual sessions. Co-creation features in at least one job title I know of. Forrester has got behind it. Even Michael Porter has shifted his thinking this year to a concept of ‘shared value’. And in market research, after 3 consecutive years of promotion at various conferences as well as in the MR press, co-creation looks as though it’s become a standard MR offering: currently there are at least 70 MR agencies offering co-creation services - pretty startling progress from a few years back!

But like the underground indie fan who starts worrying that his favourite band has sold out once more than 3 people are willing to schlepp to hear them on a rainy Tuesday night in Camden, I find myself wondering what the new fans are up to. Are they into the same tunes as me? Which part of the sound excites them most? Don’t they know about the early days? One thing I can be sure of: there will be plenty of variation. This isn’t a well-defined process or procedure, not yet. To my mind co-creation’s an idea, not a tool. But is this how our ‘industry’ sees it?

There’s a fairly strong minority who still think co-creation’s a mirage; like the emperor’s new clothes, when you look closely there’s nothing there. This group tends to ask, slightly incredulously, “Isn’t it just a big focus group?” And there’s also a natural resistance to some of the different working practices that co-creation brings...are we blurring boundaries?

But there is also a broadly positive mood emerging that takes one of 3 different perspectives as its starting point:

		it’s a valid new technique that needs integrating into the toolkit, but it’s just that...an isolated technique which has a specific function at a specific time...a sort of research monkey wrench.
		It’s just another version of what good qualitative research has been doing for a while – some of these co-creation converts are a little naive, so let’s not forget the craft skills along the way.
		It’s a disruptive technology, a fundamental challenge to MR’s positivist / social science basis and in many respects runs counter to market research practice, we can either embrace that or resist it.

In other words, there are weak and strong claims that can be made for co-creation. And of course, depending on your perspective, all of them have merits.

Of course researchers love a new technique. And with falling response rates for traditional panel work, a co-creative approach seems a logical place to look for novelty, alongside the hyper-scientific (brain science, facial analysis etc). But I think we have to raise an eyebrow here and there, particularly in the online space, where increasingly basic panel approaches are being given a bit of spit and polish, a couple of creative gizmos thrown in and re-branded communities. I think it’s dangerous to reduce co-creation to a technique unless you have the wider context and field of enquiry in mind. It’s a bit like semiotics in that respect. So I think we need to look beyond an object-oriented view of co-creation as NPD, another tool for getting input on new products and services, however important to the co-creation mix this will be.

So the question really becomes: is co-creation an evolution or a revolution?

I have a lot of sympathy for the evolution argument. In my investigations into the pre-history of co-creation it’s notable how much comes from research-related fields like psychotherapy (Freud, but also Jung, Winnicott...) and organisational psychology (particularly Kurt Lewin, the creator of action research), but also from literary theory and the whole linguistics-based side of things: after all meaning is always co-created. Equally there are inputs from the world of service design, particularly around participatory design, which has often run in parallel with market research practice. But I wonder how much of this gets aired, or needs to get aired, when co-creation’s on the agenda?

Look at the wider business world and it’s clear the game has changed. Companies are being built on co-creative foundations (think NIKE ID, Lego, and Apple). Technology for communication, collaboration, pro-am creativity is ubiquitous and easy to use. People have more time to invest and more opportunities for getting involved as Clay Shirky has been arguing (see his Cognitive Surplus). Co-creation’s potential is of a different order now. And the areas of interest to businesses are more in line with open innovation, mass customisation, creating a dialogue with customers. I don’t want to sound like some kind of prophet – much of the potential will turn out to be groundless, much will be reduced once the novelty has worn off. But some significant part will stick. Our challenge will be to find the sticky bits.

Market research is typically still seen as a ‘traditional’ and safe, but useful activity, by the outside world. And it will take a while to shift this view when so much is still fundamentally measurement, evaluation, opinion polling, and tracking. To my mind the risk for research actually is being left out. Can we be more a part of creation, of productive work, and less about understanding the past? Market research shouldn’t be worried about competition. It’s substitution it needs to worry about. Becoming irrelevant. Becoming a smaller and smaller part of the pragmatic management toolkit. And letting management consultants, technologists, and marketing / innovation agencies rule the co-creation roost is one way of continuing to be irrelevant. If you go to the Co-Creation Association conference, for example, you won’t find many market researchers there. The term resonates in quite a different way.

Co-creation can be seen on a spectrum: at one end we have co-creation as new MR tool; at the other we have co-creation as a value-creation ethos. As new MR tool co-creation stands for a more creative group approach, online communities perhaps, and some versions of customer closeness, but in any case it’s a subset of market research rather than a new activity or approach in its own right. As a value-creation ethos co-creation straddles ‘platform’ approaches like NIKE ID and iPhone, which allow users to add value to the experience as well as socialising it, but also the whole-organisational approach that a dialogue implies. Moving towards this end of the spectrum implies a much greater focus on organisational factors and making things happen. So I think we have choices to make about where we invest our time and energy, and we need to recognise that the palette is broadening to include:

		Co-creation as management ethos
		Co-creation as open innovation practice
		Co-creation as approach to meaning-making
		Co-creation as organisational change
		Co-creation as business model
		Co-creation as workshop / group facilitation technique

But there’s also considerable cause for optimism. Researchers have a vital contribution to make, precisely because there’s much of the outside world that’s trying to appropriate co-creation as the label for things like mass customisation and some pretty basic, quantity not quality-based, crowd-sourcing. There’s a wealth of craft needed for successful co-creation – it’s not a miraculous thing that just occurs by itself. And the qualitative tradition in particular has a lot to offer to co-creation practitioners whichever domain they see themselves in.

Dr Nick Coates

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