Many companies across the business spectrum are turning to co-creation to market new opportunities and innovate their offerings. Co-creation has become such a dominant trend that most European organisations have piloted co-creation projects — as shown in this recent Hitachi report. The study also reveals that co-creation has transformed how 57% of companies approach innovation.
Like other fields, the EV industry has embraced co-creation. Nissan, for example, has been working with the Thai government to expand Thailand’s EV ecosystem and boost EV rollout — along with Nissan EV sales.
But forming mutually beneficial partnerships is a challenge requiring different parties to share project control and financing. This is a risk for unproven partnerships. Another difficulty is that co-creation projects take time, especially as you need to align the objectives of distinct organisations.
Despite these challenges, EV co-creation has many advantages. We explore the top co-creation benefits in another blog post, which dives into how co-creation leads to improved supplier relationships, better products, and higher ROI. In this article, we help you maximise your co-creation opportunities by sharing our collaboration best practices, along with examples of successful co-creation projects.
EV co-creation best practices
From creating a strong operational model to aligning your objectives, here are our tips on getting the best possible results out of your co-creation partnerships.
1. Find strong co-creation partners
You need experts that can help drive initiatives forward and maintain momentum, along with suppliers and distributors that can source the best materials, and end-users that can help ideate and refine concepts. To this end, potential partners should have a history of driving innovation in their sectors.
After assessing your partner’s capabilities, you need to define a mutual value proposition. Co-creation only works when both organisations bring value to the table.
Read this blog post to learn about what you should look for in an EV co-creation partner. From collaborating with universities to working with your customers, we also share examples of the different types of co-creation partnerships.
2. Aligning strategy and objectives
Co-creation requires considerable planning and strategy upfront. A key step is to align on co-creation objectives to determine the scope of the project, define what project success looks like and then build out co-creation timelines. This also involves breaking down each partner’s time and market investments.
After aligning on your objectives, you need to determine project responsibilities. This includes unpacking the work to be delivered per objective and how this work will be delivered, i.e. remotely, together or by a third party.
You should have a plan for what to do and how to do it. The more details you can include, the more transparent your partnership becomes.
3. Create a flexible operating model
A principal issue with typical OEM business relationships is that boundaries are never tested — that is, products, services and solutions are always developed to brief.
While this approach ensures that there’s consistency and no margin for error, it often means that new opportunities or capabilities go unrealised. In the hyper-competitive automotive industry of today, simply “following instructions”, isn’t enough to generate the next big thing. Many OEMs provide rigid briefs and aren’t flexible enough to think past the product — but allowing for experimentation is what leads to innovative co-creation partnerships.
For a co-creation example, let’s imagine that you’re an EV OEM working with a supplier. Ultimately, you don’t need a supplier that just supplies components, but one that understands the wider implications of other aspects of the EV vehicle, i.e. thermal management, safety, design, and build, as well as their key specialism. The more your supplier knows and the more empowered they are to express their knowledge, the better your product will be.
This is the case with all EV co-creation examples — innovation happens when suppliers, end-users, and manufacturers can offer insight at every stage of the process. But how do you bake this flexibility into your project operations? In this blog post, we look at how agile co-creation methodology empowers your partnerships to deliver beyond the brief. Read it to learn how agile leads to faster innovation and shared responsibility for project outcomes.
4. Learn from failed business collaborations
Not all co-creation projects are successful. Different visions, market changes, or not meeting product expectations are common sources of failure.
Starbucks, for example, didn’t include regular contract renegotiations in their 1998 coffee distribution deal with Kraft Foods. As this agreement had become undesirable due to market shifts, Starbucks broke their deal in 2010 — in the legal aftermath, Starbucks was ordered to pay Kraft $2.75 billion. For co-creation projects, this example highlights the need to create agreements that can account for a fluid marketplace.
Henkel’s detergent labelling contest is one of many examples of failed customer co-creation. Their contest had customers submit and then vote on labels for their new dishwasher detergent. The winner by customer vote was a poorly designed label with the caption, “Tastes Yummy Like Chicken”. One lesson from this is, when co-creating with customers, don’t create opportunities for disingenuous customers to ridicule your company.
While co-creation failures can be avoided through meticulous project design, it’s difficult to know what factors you may be overlooking. As useful as it is to learn from collaboration failures, it’s as valuable to learn from successes.
Examples of co-creation done right
To give you a better idea of what co-creation done right looks like, we’ve compiled a few examples of successful co-creation projects.
-
Ford
Launched in 2005, Ford’s Aligned Business Framework is designed to boost the working relationship and supply-chain efficiencies with its suppliers, resulting in better product collaboration, faster innovations and lower production costs.
When first manufacturing the 2015 Mustang, for example, Ford worked closely with their suppliers to introduce new technologies that impacted the car’s quarter windows, A-pillar and roof rails, steel frame, and headlamps.
- IKEA
In early 2018, Swedish furniture and home goods retailer IKEA launched ‘Co-Create IKEA’, a digital platform encouraging customers and fans to develop new products.
IKEA’s co-creation platform focuses on four specific areas:
- Asking customers for product ideas and suggestions
- Running IKEA boot camps to work with entrepreneurs
- Collaborating with university students on product solutions
- Connecting with innovation labs around the world
If a suggested furniture or product design is successful, IKEA licenses it and agrees to invest in future products. For designers and technically talented engineers, this creates a strong incentive to gain exposure through the world’s largest furniture retailer.
-
tesa
As a fully IATF 16949 certified co-development partner, our approach is to leverage our global research and development network to build custom solutions for our co-creation projects. For EV powertrains, this might include tailoring solutions for electrical insulation, mounting, thermal management and fire protection.
- Intel and SAP
Since 1997, leading computing company Intel has worked closely with software giant SAP to co-develop hardware and software solutions.
In 2019, they announced that they were integrating Intel’s latest hardware innovations into SAP’s enterprise software applications. By bundling their solutions with SAP applications, Intel enjoys greater market penetration, while SAP benefits from early access to Intel’s emerging technology.
Intel and SAP co-innovation helps their customers manage more data at faster speeds and at a reduced cost.
-
SAIC Motor and Alibaba
Auto manufacturer SAIC Motor has recently partnered with massive technology company Alibaba to co-create Zhiji Auto — a $1.5 billion EV project.
By marrying SAIC’s car manufacturing experience with Alibaba’s big data and cloud computing technology, they aim to offer more car services and applications. This includes in-vehicle ecommerce, smart-voice recognition and reliable and fast self-parking features.
-
DHL
Over the last decade, DHL, the world’s largest courier, has hosted workshops with customers in Germany and Singapore to find and create new solutions and improve client experience.
These workshops have been formalised and are now ‘DHL Innovation Centers’. At these centres employees and customers work together to come up with new initiatives to help DHL’s performance.
This approach has bolstered DHL’s customer satisfaction scores, causing them to rise over 80% (resulting in higher client retention) and they’ve been able to drastically reduce delivery times for some items thanks to crowdsourced technologies.
Innovation through co-creation
When done right, co-creation is an innovation avenue that allows EV manufacturers to keep pace with their competitors. By following our best practices and learning from our customer and industry co-creation examples, you’ll be well-positioned to innovate your EV offerings.
Now that you know what successful EV co-creation looks like, what’s next? To help you on your co-creation journey, we’ve developed a guide for unlocking innovation through co-creation.
In our guide, we highlight:
-
How co-creation is empowering automotive manufacturers to chase new opportunities and rapidly bring to market new solutions
-
The key benefits of co-creation
-
The best way to build a team for co-creation
-
And much, much more
Click the button below to download your free copy.
