Idea in Brief
Large problems often present big opportunities. The challenge is that their solutions often require the collaborative efforts of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people from different organizations. The best way to make this happen is to provide platforms on which these people can engage with one another and invent new ways to create value for their organizations and themselves.
The first step in building such a “co-creation” system is to identify a large problem that everyone has an interest in. Then you should devise and test hypotheses about the segments of the community that need to be engaged, the platforms that will allow their members to connect in new ways, the interactions that will result, the experiences that members will get out of the interactions, and the value that could be generated to create a win for all.
A model for this is a work in progress that Becton, Dickinson and Company is orchestrating. A global leader in supplying syringes, BD is using co-creation to deepen its ties with hospital chains by helping them reduce the incidence of infections caused by unsafe injection and syringe-disposal practices.
All companies—even those in entirely B2B, brick-and-mortar industries—are now in a Facebook-like business. Their leaders have to be community organizers who strive to engage the customers, suppliers, employees, partners, citizens, and regulators that make up their ecosystems. A good way to do that is to provide those stakeholders with the means to connect with the company—and with one another—and encourage them to constantly invent new ways to create value for their organizations and themselves.