The basic building block for co-creation in marketing or business endeavors is asking questions: i.e. research. Asking the right questions of ALL key stakeholders who will be involved or benefit from the solution. Effective co-creation yields insight and innovative solutions to everything from enhancing a brand to developing products and services.

Typically, co-creation research begins at a different starting point of solving a problem than more traditional approaches e.g. a more traditional approach to designing a new service might ask the questions: “How do we offer a service at an acceptable cost and time-to-market while meeting the requirements of the customer.” The customer experience ends up defined as a set of features.

Co-creation begins by focusing on the experience of all stakeholders in designing the solution. By doing this, challenges are looked at from a different perspective. Better experiences are created for all stakeholders including employees and channel partners, often forgotten in conventional analysis.

According to Francis Gouillart, president of the Experience Co-Creation Partnership and Venkat Ramaswamy a professor of marketing at the University of Michigan (co-authors of The Power of Co-Creation: Build it With Them to Boost Growth, Productivity and Profits (Free Press, 2010)), if you’re looking for incremental improvement, co-creation may not be a model to use. If, however, you need fresh new ways of trying to solve a business challenge, rather than looking to solve it with approaches that have been used with some success in the past yet don't seem to be yielding solid results today, you may want to consider a co-creation approach that focuses on an improved experience for all stakeholders. The payoff for marketers is something we strive for: competitive advantage. Take a look at how Cisco has adopted co-creation into the DNA of the company.