#59—Venkat Ramaswamy: Rethinking Value Creation through Co-Creation

Venkat Ramaswamy is Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. He is a globally-recognized thought leader, idea practitioner, and eclectic scholar with wide-ranging interests in innovation, strategy, marketing, branding, IT, operations, and the human side of the organization.

Venkat's award-winning book in 2004, The Future of Competition, co-authored with the late C.K.Prahalad, introduced Co-Creation as a revolutionary concept. It provided a new frame of reference for jointly creating value through experienced environments and called for a process of co-creation—the practice of developing offerings through ongoing collaboration with customers, employees, managers, financiers, suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders.

Their articles, the popular 2000 Harvard Business Review article “Co-opting Customer Competence” and the 2003 MIT-PwC award-winning Sloan Management Review article “The New Frontier of Experience Innovation” envisioned an individual and experience-centric view of interactive value creation and innovation.

Venkat's 2010 book, The Power of Co-Creation (with F. Gouillart) showed how enterprises in over twenty industry sectors were all leveraging platforms to create new interactions with people everywhere in the system and how new forms of value could be created together with individuals through a focus on human experiences.

Venkat is currently working on co-creating systemic transformation and positive impact on wellbeing-wealth-welfare, through platforms in digitalized societal ecosystems that afford the enactment of interactional creation by engaging and organizing actors (across the plural, private, and public sectors).

In this podcast, he shares:

How digital technologies including IoT, edge computing, and AI are forcing us to fundamentally re-conceptualize strategy Why we should be thinking of experiences—rather than products and experiencers—instead of customers What it take to flip the mind-set of yourself your leadership, and your company to be ready for the future of competition

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-Venkat Ramaswamy

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Episode Timeline:

00:00—Introducing Venkat + The topic of today’s episode

2:54—If you really know me, you know that...

3:55—What is your definition of strategy?

5:00—How is the idea of value being re-created, and how does that relate to strategy?

8:03—Do you believe it is now easier to coordinate multiple services to deliver a composite experience, and why is that?

11:00—How do you balance the many facets of how the "experiencers" are shifting their expectations of services and products, and how ecosystems are changing the value delivery?

13:15—Could you explain what the mental shift we need to make in imagining a value chain is, and why is it happening now?

15:27—How do you think the pandemic accelerated accepting the technological changes and innovations happening?

20:21—Could you tell us your definition of co-creation?

21:15—What is the cognitive leap that we need to make, and how can a CSO help leadership make that transition?

22:54—What are your thoughts on people shifting their mindset through this big fundamental mind-shift of creating value through ecosystems and interactions?

26:00—How can people connect with you and keep learning from you?

26:23—What are the downsides to the shifts we've been talking about, especially in relation to the new risks they bring?

24:13—How can people connect and follow you to keep learning from you?

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Additional Resources:

Personal page: http://www.venkatramaswamy.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/prof_venkat

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/venkat-ramaswamy-ba522810