BBMG
New York based Brand Innovation Company BBMG recently launched an online community. BBMG in its own words: “We help organizations embrace innovation, forge new markets, discover new products and services, create new experiences and drive real culture change.”

Converstations
To be able to achieve this they regularly talk to the customers of their clients. The recent addition of a private community platform heavily intensifies this process and opens up a whole new world of possibilities in search of insights.

The Collective
The Collective is a platform that (eventually) will host a couple of thousand “lead users” that share their ideas with BBMG and influence the inception process of new products and services. “Whether you’re a concerned citizen, an entrepreneur or someone who believes in the power of social media to do good, The Collective offers a convenient way to help create the change you want to see in the world. ” the tagline says.

Ideations
From a technical side of view, the platform runs on Ideations1, our modular community tool. The platform hosts a Challenge module, a forum, an online journal and a weblog. The design was created by the internal BBMG design team. The Redesignme team then draped this design over the Ideations1 backbone. The results are astonishing.

Way to go
The Collective by BBMG is another great example of a company doing things right by conducting the “expertise” of end-users in a co-creation effort. We are proud that we can be part of this process.

About Ideations v1
Ideations is being used by our clients as their primary market research tool, crowdsourcing platform or online suggestion box for employees. With Ideations, our clients are able to build their own online community. They can choose between a range of modules like a journal, forum,  creative challenges, weblog, newsletter system and many more. The platform is almost completely self serviceable. Besides all functionality, our design team is able to completely restyle the platform to meet our client’s corporate identity. One of the many successful cases that ran on Ideations 1, is the ANWB case, which can be downloaded here.

The next level
Although Ideations has served us and our clients well, we decided it was time for an upgrade. Our goal is to always give our clients the best possible way of connecting with customers and giving their customers the best possible user-experience. With the experience we gained through the years and with the feedback from our clients, we now take the platform to the next level.

What stays, what goes and what will be new
So what can you expect from Ideations2, compared to Ideations 1? First, we keep what’s good, so all current modules will reappear in Ideations2. But some of them, like the Challenges module, will get a total overhaul. The default design of the platform is completely redone and this enables even better customization to our client’s needs.
Community managers will be happy to hear that the admin panel has been rebuild from scratch, giving you total control and overview of user groups, newsletters and community performance.

Usablity = key
We are also improving the usability of the platform. With clear and easy to understand document pages and forms, we try to create a more user friendly environment. To enrich the usability even more, we use new web techniques whenever we think they can improve the platform.

MIE 2012
We are really excited about this product which is planned for release next spring. We will be previewing Ideations2 at the MIE (Marketing Information Event) in The Hague, Netherlands on 1 & 2 februari 2012.

Next we will unleash some more details about Ideations2. So check back soon!

About Connect
For starters, Redesignme Connect is our creative community, where over 9000 people from all parts of the world solve Challenges that companies upload. Challenges range from food companies that need ideas for new packaging to companies that are in search of a name for their new service or business.

Collaboration & Profile
Redesignme Connect is all about collaboration, creativity, be seen and most important: connecting with others. That’s why we’ve redesigned the profile pages entirely. We now introduce a personal wall (obviously inspired by Facebook) where people can tell what they are working on and they can send eachother personal messages. People can follow other people who’s work they like, and get an overview of all their work with the click of a button. Also the portfolio section has been extended, enabling people to show other work they did, which is not related to Challenges.

Company pages
If you run your own company, or work for one, you can now have a dedicated company page where you can show & tell about your company. The page also shows all Challenges that you ran or have been running. Use it to advertise your business, or attract more people to your Challenges.

Simplified ordering process
We also simplified to ordering process for companies that wish to upload a Challenge. We now introduce 3 simple packages (A, B and C) for a fixed price of € 499, €999 and € 1.499 depending on the total amount of rewards you’d want to set and guidance you’d like from our community manager Eveline.

Site speed improvement & several small changes
Most of the content is now loaded with AJAX which massively speeds up loading times. The header section of the site is now cleaner, introducing a slick drop-down panel for the login, registration and profile settings controls. Your activity can be automatically posted to your Twitter or Facebook wall, and you can control what gets posted and what not.

Mobile version (in the making)
And last but not least, we introduced a (basic) mobile version of the site. If you now surf to the site using your iPhone or Android phone, you’ll see a clear overview of all latest site activity. The mobile version is build on jQuery Mobile. Functionality is still very basic, but this is something we will be working on in the next months.

So that’s a lot, and we will continue to work on our most loved community. Have a lot of fun with the new features and let us now what you think. Happy Redesigning!

Maxim Schram

CEO, Redesignme.

The report compares the top vendors in the current market and uses a 34-criteria evaluation.

The report is available to Forrester customers or can be bought seperately here.

We’ll at least that’s what we’ve thought. Therefor we recently published 3 clientcases on our corporate website. Together with clients like ANWB, Pickwick and Schiphol Airport we tried to summarize the projects we did together. The analysis, based on our 3-step approach, gives you insights on what approach we took and which tools we used to answer a specific business need.

For now, 3 clientcases are available for you to download, read and share. We’ll make sure to keep adding more cases in the future, because we believe in sharing insights and we believe in co-creation; it’s time to connect!

Joyce van Dijk, a master student at Wageningen University, recently presented a comprehensive paper about ‘the co-creative consumer’. Our creative community Redesignme.com has been mentioned as a platform that facilitates consumers into ‘the role of ideator’. The subtitle of her paper is; Exploring the changing consumer/producer relations and consumer roles in modern product innovation practices’. In this blogpost we would like to highlight the most important findings of Joyce’s paper regarding the different roles of consumers within a co-creation process. You can read more about Joyce and read/download her paper at her weblog ‘Joyce Discovers’. In addition to her paper Joyce also interviewed some practitioners who deal with co-creation in their profession, to explore their views on co-creation. Our co-creation consultant Ingrid de Laat also participated in one of these interviews.

Theoretical framework

To set the scope and focus, Joyce starts with a theoretical framework:

“The general development of involving consumers in innovation practices is coined ‘co-creation’ in 2000 by Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004a). It underlines that value creation no longer merely stems from inside the firm. The new business paradigm is to create and maintain an active dialogue with consumers and use them as open-innovation resources (Prahalad & Ramaswamy 2004). While consumers were traditionally viewed as value exchangers and extractors, they are now considered a source of value creation and competitive advantage.”

A lot is written about co-creation and related topics. Therefore it is always needed to provide people with a clear definition of the word before heading to any insights and conclusions. Van Dijk defines co-creation as follow:

“Purposive and intentional collaboration between consumers and producers, where they systematically interact, learn, share information and integrate resources with the result of co-creating value”.

Identifying the roles consumers can play

The paper offers a new perspective by identifying the various roles that consumers can take on in modern innovation practices. These roles are based on level of autonomy and influence in co-creating value. Co-creation can occur in various settings and at different levels of task complexity. The paper focuses on identifying the roles consumers can play in a firm´s innovation process. These roles are connected to the level of consumer influence and autonomy in the innovation process and range from ‘insight providers’ to ‘creators’.

1) The first role is that of ‘insight provider’, which is characterized by a low level of (direct) consumer influence and autonomy in the innovation process. Consumers are merely sourced by firms to help find solutions, provide insights, identify needs or evaluate ideas.

Example: Google’s +1 button

2) In the role of ‘customizer’ the consumer has a direct influence in the final stages of product development; adapting and selecting a predetermined set of product features that fit their own preferences. Consumers can create value individually but only up to the extent to which the firms’ value chain supports this.

Example: NikeID

3) The role of ‘ideator’ is the next step towards an active consumer role in innovation practices. Here, consumers are collectively addressed by firms to provide their creative input and innovative products ideas. The results will finally become intellectual property of the firm and will be used as inspiration for innovation.

Example: RedesignMe.com

4) The role of ‘co-creator’ involves actual open innovation, where firms collaborate with consumers and use their skills and knowledge in developing new products. Co-creation involves all phases of the innovation process; idea generation, design and engineering and finally the test and launch phase. It often takes place in an online community, which provides a constant platform for interactive dialogues between participants. Co-creation is an ongoing process of learning, developing and evaluating ideas together. In the role of ‘co-creator’, consumers’ skills and knowledge are directly integrated in the business process.

Example: BMW Group Co-creation Lab

5) The final role that is defined is that of the ‘creator’; where innovation is initiated and driven by consumers themselves. Here, consumers act as involved and independent value creators. Füller et al. (2006a) recognize that only some community members are able to create ‘professional’ innovation, but the less skilled members help by coming up with ideas for improvement, or asking challenging questions.

Example: Harley Owners Group (HOG)

It’s all about the dynamics

You can debate wether RedesignMe.com facilitates the ‘ideator’ role or maybe it leans more towards the role of ‘co-creator’. It all depends on the amount of inspiration and involvement that a challenge brings to the table. This can be done with an extensive briefing which leaves no room for questions but enough space for creativity. Besides that, the dynamics of a challenge depend on the dedication and involvement of the client. At RedesignMe we always advise our customers to involve multiple employees to the active challenge. Stimulate and inspire them to be a part of the community and make sure the dialogue with the creative Redesigners is always up to date. With this approach you show dedication and you enlarge the motivation of the participants and therefore the final outcome.

A balanced community

Our tailor-made platform ideations, will address the roles of ‘ideator’, ‘co-creator’ as well as ‘creator’. Because you can determine who you want to invite to the platform, you are able to create a well balanced community. For instance, you can invite a group of creatives and marketeers to come up with the ideas, a group of designers to make the ideas visually attractive and in the end your employees and customers can give feedback. This process can be repeated until the desirable output is produced. With such an approach you also create support within the internal organization and you can do research by asking your customers what they think of the ideas.

Benefits and challenges

At the end of her research Joyce van Dijk presents an overview that shows the benefits of co-creation and the challenges a firm can face when using co-creation methods.

“There are many benefits of successful co-creation, but these can only be achieved if co-creation principles are applied correctly and are integrated throughout the business process. This requires firms to adapt their processes and mindset in order to effectively engage in co-creation. Firms should become more open and willing to integrate external sources in their innovation process. They should listen and observe their target group, determine main objectives for co-creation, and identify and involve appropriate co-creation partners”.

We were eager to read about Joyce’s research. If you are interested in her paper and her research, you can visit her blog.

In 2010 Steven van Belleghem introduced a new term; the conversation manager. To explain the working area of this new officer he wrote a constructive book about it (with the same title). Here at RedesignMe we embrace the insights the book gives and give it as a present to every new customer. The message of the book is simple: “The digital environment we are living in has evolved from a static one into a highly dynamic one.” With a RedesignMe.com community of over 7000 creatives we have learned about Conversation Management (or community management) the hard way.

It’s all about trust

One of the first things that the book shows is the importance of trust. As research points out, we have little trust in people or companies nowadays that show some kind of top-down communication hierarchy. The new era of consumers is mostly influenced by people like themselves. With this in mind a company can of course try to become ‘one of the guys’ but the biggest danger of this is that a brand can quickly be seen as “unauthentic”. One recent example is that of a fake Cup-A-Soup CEO that had his own twitter account.

It’s all about (social) engagement

The second option (and a far better one) is to make sure that people (can) become involved and engaged. Trying to facilitate interactions between the different stakeholders shows to be a very effective strategy. This way, a company does not try to be a friend, but facilitates the interactions between friends on behalf of the brand.

An excellent example of such a conversation management practice is  www.mystarbucksidea.com. Here, customers translate wishes into ideas and the platform is designed to generate feedback of peers. When others like it, the idea will get more publicity on the platform and eventually will end up in the development program of Starbucks itself. This way Starbucks knows on beforehand if an idea could be a hit.

It’s all about “ideas in action”

Up until now 24.500 ideas on coffee & espresso drinks have been dropped in the Starbucks community. Apart from coffee ideas, over 11.000 food ideas and over 10.000 atmosphere ideas have been submitted. Of course not all of them have actually been developed and launched, but a lot of them did make it to the actual shops. The latest ideas which were deployed are ‘drinking water from a glass instead of plastic’ (environmental issue) and ‘Hawaiian Kona Coffee’ (because Hawaii is the only state in the US that grows coffee). It is very important to show that you are actually willing and seriously trying to put ideas in real life. This is the recipe for customer loyalty, something you will need if you want to involve and engage in your customers.

To sum things up

The Starbucks case is an excellent example of how Research & Development, conversation management and brand engagement comes together in a beautiful way.

The bottom line of this short insight: read the book of Steven van Belleghem!



Here’s an excerpt from their product description:

“ITAS, the IDEE System Tacho Analysis shows that there is much to save. The analysis of the digital tachograph does not only give the operator a multitude of opportunities for cost optimization of the vehicle fleet, but also prolongs the life of expensive vehicles significantly, the residual value is increased and harmful emissions are decreased. Economically and environmentally conscious driving therefore go hand in hand with ITAS. ITAS provides insight into the use of vehicle and driver behavior including; Driving style analysis, Fuel Reduction, Accident Analysis, Injury Prevention, Fraud Analysis and Lower Maintenance costs.”

Creative challenge on RedesignMe.com

While the benefits of using the ITAS system were clear and could be proven, IDEE Systems were experiencing difficulties in reaching out to enough fleet managers who were willing to try the system. Innovation specialist Ferry van de Vliet, a person close to the company, proposed crowdsourcing platform RedesignMe.com to call for ideas. While we had initial doubts if our community of (mostly) designers could handle this marketing-minded Challenge, the results were both unexpected and spectaculair.

In a couple of weeks the Challenge received 4000 pageviews and 16 community members participated. There were 33 solutions posted and 77 comments. While these numbers were not very spectaculair, the ideas themselves were impressive.

Winning idea

MichaelC's idea sketch

One particular idea gained the attention of the marketing team of IDEE Systems. Community member “MichaelC” (age 44) from the United States suggested that IDEE Systems should give away an award to the company that successfully saved energy by using the system. Here is his own initial description with an initial design for a sticker that can be attached to a truck.

“Create a certificate that is an INTERNATIONAL GREEN AWARD that the target companies can put on their trucks and uniforms. It will look great on the truck and show the community and other similar companies an indication that they care about the world and community. This logo says ITAS and also will incorporate the IDEE logo. There are international GREEN organizations such as GREEN PEACE and 350.ORG and Alliance for Climate Protection that will give you an award or classification as a company promoting GREE

N technology and allow you to put their logo on yours and co-promote your GREEN AWARD. This gives even more validity to your GREEN AWARD . Also tell these organizations and the companies that if all delivery vehicles move more efficiently using ITAS it improves traffic for all the other vehicles to move more efficiently which improves their gas milage. “

As described by MichaelC.

Press conference

Seeing this idea immediately triggered IDEE Systems to create such an award. They created a certificate that could be handed out to the winning company and also asked a designer to create a bronze sculpture.
Finally they organized a press meeting to hand out the award to their most precious client, Schuitema, famous for the Dutch supermarket brand C1000. In the following image you see a picture made during the press conference.

Last but not least, there currently are about 40 trucks on the Dutch roads driving around with the “green label” exactly as suggested by MichaelC.

Democratizing innovation

ITAS' final implementation as seen on the road

For all participants in this co-creation project this has been a very successful case. It is an example that depicts the power of co-creation from initial idea to a succesful implementation. It’s a textbook example for many companies that are considering to take external (consumer or expert driven) innovation to a higher level.

The FSB Sensations of the Ordinary Award has arisen from the idea to give young designers a change to display their talents and give them a platform. The challenge was to design an innovative door handle model that radiates simplicity in design. The submissions were therefore assessed on three major conditions, namely design, ergonomics and materials.

The open competition resulted, in partnership with RedesignMe, in dozens of entries from all around the world. From all these entries five nominees were selected. During the Dutch Design Week their designs are displayed as prototype at the FSB-stand at the Klokgebouw. The nominees also receive an invitation to visit the FSB factory in Germany.

On Saturday, October 30 at 16:00 the winner of the challenge will be presented. A jury with professionals selects a winner, who will be rewarded with 10.000 RDMs. The presentation of the Award is free to visit at the small exhibition room in the Klokgebouw.

Those who like to view nominees’ prototypes are welcome to visit the FSB-stand at the Klokgebouw 50, hall 3 in Eindhoven. The exhibition is free to visit from Saturday 23 October till Sunday 31 October from 12:00 till 18:00 and on Thursday and Friday from 12:00 till 20:00.

Co-creatie
Bij co-creatie wordt de consument, eindgebruiker, of burger direct onderdeel van de organisatie en betrokken bij beslissingstrajecten. Voorbeelden kunnen zijn een gemeente die via een website in dialoog gaat met haar burgers of een snoepfabrikant die consumenten mee laat denken over de verpakking.

Genomineerden
De Co-creation Association heeft 4 genomineerden geselecteerd. Onder de potentiële winnaars zijn; DSB The Movie, de eerste film tot stand gekomen d.m.v. co-creatie. Ontwikkelzelf.lab van Verzekeruzelf B.V., kleine verzekeraar start dialoog met haar klanten met een online co-creatie platform. Sara Lee, multinational durft klanten mee te laten denken via www.openinnovationsaralee.com en Second Bloom, samen ontwikkelen met bouwbedrijf en de buurtbewoners van de ideale woning en woonomgeving, op www.secondbloom.nl.

Jury
De winnaar wordt bepaald door een jury van co-creatie en innovatie experts. De 4 juryleden zijn; Hans Robertus Directeur Dutch Design Week, Prof.dr.ir. Jan van den Ende Professor of Management of Technology and Innovation Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, Dolf Wittkämper voorzitter van de Co-creation Association en Maxim Schram CEO van RedesignMe B.V. als juryvoorzitter.

De prijsuitreiking zal plaatsvinden tijdens de Dutch Design Week in het Klokgebouw (Strijp-S) te Eindhoven.

Locatie: Hal 3, stand 3.9 (RedesignMe B.V.)
Tijd: Vrijdag 29 oktober, 16:00u
Meer informatie: http://www.co-creationaward.com
Erbij zijn? Geef het door via: info@redesignme-cs.com