Co-Creation: Product development process with customers

Co-creation - product development process with customers

Close to the clientele with co-creation

As a rule, employees of a company, i.e. experts, develop a product or a service. Is that how the best ideas come about? To some extent, certainly. However, it is often important to take the customer’s perspective into account right from the start. Co-creation approaches take this approach and involve customers in product development and improvement. In workshops or on the web, a company’s customers or other interested parties exchange their ideas and work together on new developments and improvements. We recommend Co-Creation Workshops:

if you want to test ideas quickly in small groups (of 4-6 participants) and develop them close to customer needs

if early adopters, heavy users, experts or other important user groups should have a say in innovations, concepts and ideas.

Two methods for your innovation process

Would you also like to develop products and services together with your customers? We offer you two different methods, which can of course be combined: Co-creation workshops used selectively with 4-6 participants per group or with an online community over a longer period of time with any number of participants.

The co-creation workshops are, to a certain extent, focus groups in a small format. Content and tasks are developed in intensive exchange using a wide variety of creative methods. This is how customer-oriented products and services of tomorrow are created.

If the exchange is to take place over a longer period of time or with significantly more participants, an online community is suitable. People from the relevant user group(s) are selected, invited and brought into productive interaction with each other. In addition to classic online questionnaires, task formats such as jointly completed assignments, blogs and forums are available in which participants can present their product ideas to each other, discuss them and comment on and evaluate them. In addition to the ideas and prototypes developed, particularly important topics, trend values, likes and dislikes can be derived.

Online co-creation as an alternative to classic creative techniques

intervista was commissioned by a major Swiss company to conduct a study to test whether the newly developed brand values of “simple”, “competent” and “reliable” fit the new campaign that was being developed. So much for a classic quantitative study.

Now, however, the question arose: How can more insights be drawn from this study? The comparison between different campaign designs and their “fit” with the brand values is valuable, but it does not help to look into the minds of the respondents and get an idea of what exactly customers understand by the terms and what they associate with them. This knowledge helps enormously in designing the campaign and its imagery in such a way that the brand values are conveyed from the customer’s perspective.

We had the idea not to conduct a classic qualitative face-to-face study, but to work with an online co-creation approach. This saves time and money, both of which are usually not available in abundance. For the same budget, many more people can participate in the study online. Learn more about this use case here.