How co-creation initiative benefits when these 2 teams talk to each other.

Team 1 – The marketing team, who often arranges customer connect campaigns or competitions, for innovation or otherwise, primarily focused towards brand awareness and to create some buzz.

Team 2 - The innovation team, who is focused internally or at the most with extended network of vendors and consultants working towards finding the next big idea for the company.

There is a tremendous opportunity when these two teams talk to each other.

Let’s explore WHY and HOW you can take some action.

WHY this is an opportunity

The people who opted in or showed some interest for any of your customer connect campaigns or competitions are your low hanging opportunity for co-creation. These are the people who are more likely to know about your products and are already volunteering to be part of your initiatives at some level. These participants are your potential co-creators and you must find a way to nurture this relationship on an ongoing basis.

Also when it comes to a competition, we usually tend to focus on the winners, quite ok, but never forget that everyone who participated has potential which you can explore. These participants in any innovation competition, even if they are not selected - have shown interest in the subject and have some relevant expertise. Your cost of engaging them will be far less than doing it afresh and the results you would get would also be better than finding new set of collaborators often.

HOW you can leverage this

1. Logical first step is to identify the possible internal collaborations and initiate a dialogue. That is - which company initiatives have a potential to be your team 1, 2 … n for this cross leverage.
2. Link up your one off or annual events; - not from a campaign, message, or cause point of view but from an infrastructure point of view. In other words find a better way to leverage all your previous participants without creating too much hassle for them.
3. Give and take – Acknowledge all contributions and feedback. Do everything to make sure that you have compensated fairly to all deserving contributors and you are investing in a future participation possibility. Nothing works like participants promoting you on their own.

ideaken provides consulting solution to identify this opportunity in your company and an exclusive technology platform to bring all your external stakeholders together for co-creation engagement. To initiate a conversation with us, contact us here.