Co-creation & participation – Crowdsourcing

Goals

• Reduce your production costs
• Improve your creativity, your innovations, your products
• Bring additional richness to your products through user participation

The concept

„Why use a single provider when the market is full of people who can help you?” This is the starting point for co-creation.

Co-creation is an alternative to the traditional outsourcing of production. In a logic of outsourcing, the company entrusts external service providers with part of its production. Thus it will limit and control its production costs and considerably reduce the risks by passing them on to its service providers. Co-creation has developed from this observation based on the services that can be provided by all Internet users.

The example of Istockphoto.com is representative of the concept. Instead of hiring a professional photographer to purchase stock for artwork, you can shop for professional quality stock at istockphoto for a fraction of the price. In this specific case, the global offer is in competition with the sole provider. On one side a professional photographer and on the other a large community of amateur photographers.

How to do?

There are different levels of co-creation and integration of the Internet user in this process.

Comments from Internet users

User comments are a form of co-creation for the company. Internet users, through their opinions, will easily inform the company about the purchase and use of the product. This rich source of information allows the company to find, in all available comments, avenues for research, improvement of existing products, development and innovation for new products.

Comments aren’t just for getting feedback on products, they’re also a great way to communicate. Indeed, more than half of Internet users would be inclined to buy a product or service after reading a positive comment. The Internet users who write comments then become representatives and prescribers of the brand or product, Amazon.com has made it a decisive element of success in its business model.

Co-creation of products (Crowsourcing)

The term crowdsourcing highlights the notion of multiple contributors capable of meeting your needs.

The principle is to ask amateurs and professionals, on their free time, to work for you. Work performed in co-creation is remunerated at lower levels than the performance of a traditional actor. However, some exceptions exist regarding the financial nature of co-creation: some products are now developed free of charge and made available to everyone. It is the participation of each for all. The best known examples are Wikipedia, the free world encyclopedia, or the free operating system Linux.

Today, the Wikipedia online encyclopedia has more than 5 million articles from around the world, with more than 75,000 contributors. This encyclopedia is available in 100 different languages. Wikipedia relies solely on user input. The only contributors on the site are the Internet users and there is no systematic verification of the articles, it is the Internet users who self-regulate the veracity of the articles

In a co-creation strategy, the Internet user can intervene at two important stages:

• product design: The internet users design-sell the products. In general, this design by the Internet user is based on creativity and graphics. However, it is quite possible to use Internet users in the resolution of technical problems or in the realization of technological products.

For design and creativity, it is more interesting to have a broad spectrum and to open up the fields of research as much as possible. Thus, we are no longer limited to the vision of one or two research teams but to a large community of individuals.

• the selection of products: Internet users will select the products they prefer; Then it’s up to you to choose which ones to sell. This process has the advantage of limiting the risk when launching a product. The information collected also makes it possible to give a trend and to better know your visitors and your buyers as well as their tastes.

Co-creation has the advantage of limiting risks upstream. You get quick feedback and results from users, results which can be positive or negative but which give the advantage of better understanding the needs of your market.

Co-creation requires an openness of the company, which must be ready to communicate on its products and to let the users speak with the risk of receiving negative opinions which must above all be taken as a source of progress and devolution.

Source: 7 stratégies e-marketing illustrées, within the framework of the Etoile Project, a European INTERREG 3A project financing with the support of the ERDF. License CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 FR. Independent translation and adaptation by Nicolae Sfetcu