It's much bigger.
People have been splitting hairs lately. Crowdsourcing. Expertsourcing. Collaboration. Open Innovation. Co-creation. It's all the same. It's about creating open organizational architecture and co-creating with people.
Back in 2003 when I started writing about co-creation in Beyond the Brand it was a simple thing. A dream, really.
"People today expect the ability to co-create and lead innovation, forcing companies to devise creative solutions to be competitive in this new bottom-up age. Such an environment creates opportunities for companies who are creative and intimately listen to the cultures they are involved with; joining forces with other creatives including artists, journalists, filmmakers and musicians to create new ways of expression and creation. The resulting products that demonstrate a real understanding of their customers and the context of their customer’s lives will be successful. Instead of thinking globally and acting locally, the successful philosophy will be to think locally and act globally."
"In the vast middle of the market, people will continue to treat brands as resources. These people do not have the time or the energy to be proactive in developing their own, relevant products. Instead, they will allow their peers to do most of the heavy lifting in creating new cultural materials – and then adopt those products as their own. Brands that connect with people’s imaginations, that inspire, provoke and stimulate, helping them interpret the world that surrounds them, will be successful. Brands that are able to make the transition to provide honest, original, cultural materials, offering space for co-creation will win. Proactive people will carefully weed out and broadcast those products, and companies, that they do not trust. Many companies have already discovered that being good corporate citizens can be good for their brands. In this new era, it’s the creative citizens of a community – the people and the brands – that will help companies thrive and survive by co-creating from the bottom-up."
Now, it's gotten a lot bigger.
Today, so many great thinkers and doers are laying the foundation for the future from Clay Shirky with Cognitive Surplus to Ty Montague and team at Co: to Alex Bogusky with The Fearless Revolution to IDEO with OpenIDEO to Scott Belsky with Behance and the hundreds of other companies by playing with open organizational architecture.
What are you doing to prepare for the open revolution?
