2. Topics
• What is co-creation
• Why it matters
• Co-creation at Nokia
• Lessons learned
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3. Co-creation
• When passionate, skillful and innovative
end users create and modify products,
processes and business models either
with or without corporations
• They are so called “Lead Users”. They are
ahead of all adopter groups on an
innovation diffusion curve
• They create something new,
substantially different. Something that
no firm has developed a commercial
version for sale yet.
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5. Why it matters
• Manufacturer’s dilemma #1: Understanding
and anticipating end users’ needs is
expensive.
• => It makes economical sense to integrate
users at the front of the trend to corporate
product development as they are able to
imagine the future
• Manufacturer’s dilemma #2: Product
development is expensive
• => Parallel involvement of highly qualified
users and product development team
improves the iteration loop and handovers
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6. Why it will matter
• Emerging self-organizing collaboratives
and community brands => Brands
offering products to markets OR markets
creating sophisticated products to
challenge brands?
• Digital native generation has different
expectations towards brands
• Personalization as a mega trend => mass
customization as a basic requirement to
compete
• Rapid manufacturing becoming
economically feasible. Personal
fabrication emerging.
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7. Co-creation at Nokia
• 2006: Brought in through an internal management
training program. quot;Let's figure out whether Lego
approach works for us.quot;
• 2007-2008: Some 10 product development
projects
• February 2009: Established practice
complementing conventional product
development in our most important product lines
• Used both in category and product-level
development as well as in validation
• KPIs: R&D hit rate & efficiency
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10. Lessons learned
• Strategic fit with overall innovation
management
• Internal commitment: Involve
marketing research, design, R&D,
product management from the day 1
• Ensure that there is room for radical
innovations and will to drive the
innovations, ...and change the road map
• Foster sharing of ideas, be transparent
• Success stories and spill over are a
mechanism to drive a broader
operational change towards open, multi-
disciplinary and bottom-up
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13. Evolution of user involvement
Value
Community brand Wikipedia
User enterprise - Brand supported Ponoko
User-developed - User published Lego
User-developed - Brand published Zazzle
Co-developed - Brand published Nokia
IKEA
Brand developed - Brand published
Volume
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