Co-creation is the practice of product or service development that is collaboratively executed by developers and stakeholders together. Isaac Newton said that in his great work, he stood on the shoulders of giants. Co-creation could be seen as creating great work by standing together with those for whom the project is intended.

Among those who have helped popularise the term are management writers C K Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy, who argue in their book The Future of Competition (2004, Harvard Business School Press) that value is increasingly being co-created by the firm and the customer, rather than being created entirely inside the firm. The introduction of Enterprise social software may function as an enabler of this change in how companies evolve to business networks. And how both large and small companies cooperate.

Co-creation is at the heart of the open source software movement, where users have full access to the source code and are empowered to make their own changes and improvements to it.

Co-creation is becoming more evident in marketing, where companies such as Lego have successfully engaged many of their adult customers in designing new products, or Converse, which persuaded large numbers of its most passionate customers to create their own video advertisements for the product.

Co-creation is also used to describe the process by which actors in improvisational theatre create scenes with each other where there is no script, but only a simple structure within which to work.

See also

• Enterprise social software
• Online research community
• Wikinomics
• The New Age of Innovation