Leveraging the expertise of your partners is critical to driving innovation in a complex marketplace — which is why a whopping 83% of auto firms co-create products by engaging with customers, suppliers and even competitors.
A whopping 83% of auto firms co-create products by engaging with customers, suppliers and even competitors — according to a recent Hitachi study. Leveraging the expertise of your partners is critical to driving innovation in a complex marketplace.
As we’ve written about in this blog post, co-creating has many benefits that range from lowered costs and improved supplier relationships to creating more successful products and solutions.
But innovation can only be unlocked if you find the right co-creation partner. Research from the Scandinavian Journal of Management has found that poor partnerships lead to co-destruction — a mutual loss of resources. As this paper shows, co-destruction can result from partner mistrust, an inability to change and poor expectation-setting and processes.
To help EV companies innovate effectively, this article unpacks what you should look for in co-creation partnerships. The first step is to explore which partnerships contribute the most value.
Choosing your co-creation partner
Customers today are smarter, more resourceful and know exactly what they want implemented into the products and services they buy. So you need a partner — or a team of partners — that can anticipate their needs.
Along with understanding customer needs, you should look for partners who are at the top of their field and with a demonstrable history of driving and supporting innovation, especially in your sector. They should be just as committed to getting new EV ideas over the line as you are, and willing to invest in every stage of the process.
With this in mind, let’s dive into the types of co-creation partnerships, along with their benefits:
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Your customers
Customer co-creation involves inviting customers into the design or problem-solving process. By engaging directly with customers, you can discover features that address your customer’s experience.
IKEA, for example, launched a co-creation platform where customers could suggest products, with successful designs being rewarded with cash rewards. In the EV world, Daimler Trucks North America has frequent discussions with its customers about innovation, desired features and charging station rollouts.
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Ecosystem partners
From OEM and vehicle software to suppliers, co-creation can involve your whole value chain. This can take the form of colocation facilities to allow in-person collaboration between suppliers and manufacturers. Collaborating with dealerships, for example, can help EV companies more effectively market their vehicles.
Launched in 2005, Ford’s Aligned Business Framework is designed to boost the working relationship and supply-chain efficiencies with its suppliers, resulting in faster innovations and lower production costs.
Announced in 2021, EV firm Fisker has partnered with Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn to co-develop a line of affordable, mass-produced electric vehicles. By leveraging their shared expertise, they hope to produce their EVs in half the time it takes to launch a new vehicle.
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Government
Government co-creation ensures that your products are best positioned to serve the public interest. For the EV industry, this can mean building powertrains for EV buses according to specific regulations.
Siemens Energy has partnered with the EU to co-finance and develop maintenance solutions for gas turbines to reduce emissions.
In England, e-mobility solutions provider ULEMCo is collaborating with the London Ambulance Service to build zero-emission ambulances.
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Academia
Research partnerships with academic institutions and universities improve access to expertise not found in the private sector. Partnering with universities also opens up recruitment avenues for talented graduates.
Toyota, for example, has recently partnered with Kyoto University to develop an EV battery that will allow a car to drive 1,000km in unrestricted conditions.
In Sweden, Volvo has worked with the Chalmers University of Technology and the Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) to build the Swedish Electric Transport Laboratory (SEEL) — a state of the art for EV research and development.
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Competitors
While competition has traditionally been seen as a breeding ground for innovation, competition isn’t always enough to provide consistent value for customers. As such, many companies are turning to co-creation to drive innovation.
Recently, Ford, Suzuki and Mazda, among other manufacturers, joined to create the SmartDeviceLink Consortium. They aim to collaboratively improve their in-vehicle apps.
Last year, BYD created a venture with Toyota to develop EV batteries. When announcing their new company, Toyota Chairman Hirohisa Kishi highlighted the advantages of both combining BYD and Toyota’s strengths and maintaining a friendly rivalry.
The skills required for EV co-creation
Well-chosen EV co-creation partners add value at every stage of the ideation, design, development and delivery process. But extracting this value is a challenge, especially as typical OEM relationships tend to be structured with inflexible boundaries — where every project is developed to brief.
While this approach ensures consistency, it frustrates innovation. Instead of merely delivering on a task, you need partners who have a holistic understanding of EV vehicles, including factors like safety, design, build and thermal management, along with their speciality. To maximise co-creation, you need partners who offer insight at every stage of the process.
But insight is nothing without the right process. To this end, top EV manufacturers like Tesla have adopted agile methodology to innovate their offerings. The agile approach means that your teams work iteratively to solve one agreed-upon problem at a time. This decreases complexity and project ambiguity, creating focused teams that deliver assets on time.
For EV OEMs, the skills provided by knowledgeable suppliers profoundly impacts your co-creation process. Like agile, their EV expertise brings calm to traditionally volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) automotive environments. The research and development is — in most cases — done before the project gets underway. This means you can tap into insights as soon as you start. By combining the faster innovations of agile methodology with supplier expertise, you solve another EV challenge — long lead times resulting from in-house research and development.
Finding your EV co-creation partner
There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to selecting a co-creation partner. In the case of EV, a gap analysis can help refine your process. By determining your capability shortfalls, you’ll have a clear idea of the type of partnership that you need. For example, many manufacturers incur the majority of their costs at the supplier end of their value chain. But by working closely with suppliers, manufacturers can identify how to reduce those costs and still deliver an incredible product — this could be by sourcing more cost-effective materials or developing more streamlined sourcing processes. Your gap analysis can also guide how you create partnership goals and develop a mutual value proposition.
Always ask yourself: “How would our relationship benefit both us and our partners?”
When you’ve found a potential EV co-creation partner, it’s important to look at their project success and possible co-creation experience. While scoping co-creation partnerships, evaluate your partner’s expertise, set definite objectives and ensure that all parties understand your shared goals. These factors are critical in forming partnerships that share the same vision and product development expectations.
Let’s look at Apple and Mastercard, a co-creation success story. Their collaboration has resulted in Apple Pay and Apple Card, services that give customers a safe and easy way to make purchases through their smartphones. Apple contributes its huge client base and customer experience expertise, while Mastercard offers sophisticated payment technology. Both parties benefit — Apple gains access to Mastercard’s existing payment network, while Mastercard benefits from growth opportunities while keeping up with digital trends.
Accelerating EV innovation with your co-creation partners
Strategic partnering and innovation through co-creation — already standard in the automotive industry — is key to providing top EV solutions. We’ve shared the types of partnerships that you can pursue, our tips on selecting partners and the skills required for successful EV co-creation.
At tesa, we’ve co-created adhesive solutions for electrical and hybrid vehicles with the world’s leading OEMs and OES. Our co-development process is driven by customer collaboration and boosted by agile development tools. To learn more about our EV solutions, take a look at our service page.
We’ve also written a free ebook that covers EV co-creation in greater detail while offering more real-world examples of co-creation partnerships. Along with guiding you in choosing co-creation partnerships, it dives into setting up partnerships, measuring co-creation success and building agile teams that deliver quality outputs.
Download your copy to learn how you can use co-creation to drive electric vehicle innovation.
