Peter HorvathCommercial organizations have been putting more and more emphasis on co-creating products and services with their users and customers over the past years. This can be as simple as testing early ideas in workshops, validating usability of prototypes, or even directly involving customers in the definition of what the service should be.
Just think of Lego Ideas, where users can propose new Lego products, or Mozilla’s Firefox browser, the code-base of which is co-developed by the community of users.
Now imagine a 170 year-old company, and imagine that it has been building a co-creation system throughout its existence. Today this company is at a point where its millions of users literally have first and final say in everything the company does. It would be worthwhile to explore how this company got here, how its co-creation process works.
There’s only one caveat. This is not a company – it is a country, Switzerland.
Switzerland, through its system of direct democracy, involves its citizens in co-creation via referendums and initiatives in drastic ways. So in my view, it is the organization with the longest track record of institutionalized co-creation. As such, there is probably a lot that commercial organizations can learn from what works and what doesn’t work, and how institutionalized co-creation can be approached in service design.
This is the topic of my thesis at the executive MBA program of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. As I progress with my research, I will post bite-sized versions of chapters and sub-chapters here. I invite the service design community within and outside of Switzerland to contribute with their thoughts.
After all, how should I write about co-creation, without actually practicing it?
