Proximus NXT's view

Don't get me wrong, processes and rules are necessary for your business to function. But they shouldn't dominate every aspect of your operations. Co-creation should be about taking a proactive approach to innovation. And innovation assumes that you are willing to think outside your established processes and strictly defined rules.

Professor Muthu De Silva from the University of London defines co-creation as ‘the process of developing products or services in collaboration with customers or other stakeholders’. During that process, you'll gain a better understanding of the needs and wishes of those customers and stakeholders. This in turn allows you to develop fresh ideas and solutions that can potentially benefit not only the co-creators, but also other customers and partners.

Although co-creation can take many different forms, according to Professor De Silva it always comes down to integrating your partner's resources, knowledge, and networks into your own organization as effectively as possible. Only then can you take on new challenges and embrace opportunities.

However, it is important to resist the temptation to immediately jump to specific solutions when engaging in co-creation, as this may lead you down a narrow path. It is important to first look at the broader perspective—in an unbiased and open-minded way. This allows you to understand the challenges before you focus on solutions or technologies.

But above all, like any integration exercise, it can only succeed if you truly include all the people who need to be involved in your co-creation story. And that's where things often go wrong in practice.

How do you make your co-creation adventure a genuine success? By creating a strong bond of trust through complete transparency and putting all important agreements in writing. This can be further strengthened by having one team leader who manages the entire co-creation process from a to z.

This was the case with Agoria, the Belgian industry organization for the technology industry. We implemented, in close collaboration with their IT and HR services, a model for workplace and cloud managed services. In a co-creation process, we also built a security operations center that provides round-the-clock monitoring of their IT security. This solution can now also be used by other customers.

And yes, here too, people ultimately made the difference. They could work in an environment where there was sufficient room for experimentation and in which openness and transparency were central. Because, as I said, just having well-defined and streamlined processes will not get us there.

Tania Defraine
Telco & Platforms Practice Lead
Proximus NXT