Work is Play and Lasting Value Can Only be Co-created

As some of you know I've recently started a new job with Community development and specifically experience design - a fairly 'new' area on corporate radars, but rapidly gaining momentum all over the world as companies realise the limited growth opportunities associated with competition on price and features alone. Interestingly, delivering experiences to consumers is more than simply scripting or staging events around the company's various offerings. It is also more than merely outsourcing activities to customers and moreover, it is significantly more than marginal customisation of products.

Alas, things are close to boiling point in many industries and product categories - companies generate more goods and services than at any point in history, delivered through an ever-growing number of channels. Ironically, the large product variety has not necessarily resulted in better consumer experiences. For senior management, the situation is no better - ubiquitous connectivity, globalisation, industry deregulation and technology convergence means industry boundaries are blurring and so are product definitions. These discontinuities are releasing worldwide flows of information, capital, products and ideas, allowing nontraditional competitors to upset the status quo. Managers have to focus on more than solely costs, product and process quality, speed and efficiency - for profitable growth, we also need new sources of innovation and creativity. Paradoxically consumers have more choice that yield less satisfaction and management now has more strategic options that yield less value. We, in fact, need a need frame for value creation - co-creation of value.

Traditional business thinking starts with the premise that a company creates value. A company autonomously determines the value that it will provide through its choice of products and services and consumers represent the demand for the offerings. We are talking about an exchange process - value is extracted from exchanging ownership and thus companies have developed multiple approaches to extracting this value - increased variety of products, efficient delivery, customising them for individual consumers or wrapping contexts around them and staging the value creation process, as themed restaurants do. Ultimately we are talking about a linear build-up of cost and thus decisions on what to make, what to buy from suppliers, where to assemble and service products and a whole host of other logistics issues derive from this perspective. Employees focus on the quality of products and processes and innovation invariable entails technology, products and processes.

What if you turn this concept on its head and start with the premise that the consumer and the company co-create value and the value-creation process centres around individuals and their co-creation experiences. Thus it is no longer the exchange of products which is the locus of value creation, but instead it is the interaction between consumers and company. Context and consumer involvement contribute to the meaning of a given experience to the individual and to the uniqueness of the value co-created. So we are no longer talking about merely the quality of products and processes, but the quality of co-creation experiences. This quality depends on the infrastructure in place for the interactions between company and consumer, oriented around the capacity to create a variety of experiences. So what we are talking about is a need to build 'experience environments', places, contexts, situations, opportunities where experiences can take place and also 'experience networks' that allow individuals to co-construct and personalise their experiences.

Pine and Gilmore famously stated that 'Work is theatre & every business is a stage' - but I believe we can go much further than that. Through enabling active participation in the co-creation of value, through numerous interactions - not just with the company, but with an entire network of individuals and thematic communities, through events bringing everyone together, a multitude of different contexts that cater for the heterogeneity of individuals and their preferences and ultimately through a variety of experiences we are talking about far more than theatre. Theatre implies scripts and rigid production - improvisation on the other hand is much like play - it happens according to rules agreed on by the players and therefore I would like to postulate that 'Work is play and lasting value can only be co-created'.

For consumers the benefits of co-creation are numerous: greater level of knowledge and expertise about the product and with it greater self-esteem. This leads to emotional bonding with product and company and enhances customers' readiness to trust the company and believe in the quality of its products and not to mention the access to a community, which greatly increases a consumer's enjoyment of the product. Ultimately the experience of co-creation is markedly different from traditional product purchase and the value shifts from the price of the physical product to the value of co-designing it and the interactions between consumers, company and community.

For companies the benefits are equally dramatic and in addition to new business opportunities, co-creation offers greater consumer insight as well as ideas for design, engineering, manufacturing. Employees gain greater understanding of consumer aspirations, desires, motivations, behaviours and agreeable trade-offs regarding features and functions. Ultimately this means reduced insecurity in capital commitments. Of course there are issues that also need to be solved, such as how to interact intensively with consumers and maintain operational efficiency, how to maintain high standards and cede some control over design, how much access to give consumers, what the legal responsibilities are and how to forecast accurately - but the benefits are potentially huge if these can be solved in a satisfactory manner. Just look at Harley-Davidson.

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