Co-Doing - A Networked Approach to Doing Business

Co-Doing.
A Networked Approach to Doing
Business.
Finpro White Paper, October 2008

White Paper: Co-Doing. 2

Table of Contents
EDITORS ............................................................................................................................................................................. 2

Introduction ..................................................................................................... 3

Various definitions of co-doing........................................................................ 3

Benefits of Co-Doing....................................................................................... 4

Is there a choice?............................................................................................ 5

Variables of co-doing ...................................................................................... 5
WHAT CAN BE DONE TOGETHER?....................................................................................................................................... 5

WHO IS THE BEST PARTNER? .............................................................................................................................................. 7

HOW/IN WHICH FORM TO INTERACT?................................................................................................................................. 8

Challenges and Lessons................................................................................. 9
CLEAR LEADERSHIP, ROLE ASSIGNMENTS, AND RULES .................................................................................................. 10

UNDERSTAND MOTIVATIONS ........................................................................................................................................... 10

KNOW WHEN TO STEP IN .................................................................................................................................................. 11

TAKE STOCK OF RESOURCES ............................................................................................................................................ 11

GUARDING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND SENSITIVE DATA .......................................................................................... 13

ENSURE DIVERSITY .......................................................................................................................................................... 13

GET READY FOR TRANSFORMATION................................................................................................................................ 14

Opportunity: Enable co-doing ....................................................................... 14

Conclusion .................................................................................................... 15

About Finpro ................................................................................................. 15

Related Finpro White paper .......................................................................... 15

Editors
Ines Seidel; Innowatch
Marc Borremans, Head of Infrastructure, Construction and Logistics

© Finpro 2


Introduction
Saying “Good-Bye” may be a weird way to start. But the starting point for Co-Doing inevitably is a
Good-Bye. So let’s briefly wave good-bye to the days when customers were passive target groups,
when people by and large accepted that someone else decided what was good for them and mass
production ruled.

Today, companies are faced with customers who demand unique value and value is jumping from
products to solutions to experiences. Mass customization may be a first step towards
individualized solutions; the more radical way is to involve customers - as users and citizens - in
value creation.

Leading companies are already networking with “the crowd” and the phenomenon is getting a lot of
media and management attention.

But also networking with suppliers, other brands or even competitors creates winning solutions.

Companies do well to consider all options for interactive value creation, while also paying attention
to potential stumbling blocks.

In this paper we will outline benefits and challenges that are connected to doing business in a
networking context.

Various Definitions of Co-Doing
Crowdsourcing, Co-Creation and Open Innovation are some of the terms describing a new
networked way of doing business. There are slight differences:

Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe in Wired in 20061, is commonly defined as a
business model in which a company or institution takes a job traditionally performed by an
employee and outsource it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open
call over the internet. For example the Library of Congress, Washington, employs Crowdsourcing
when they are asking the public to help classify archival photographs through Flickr2, the image
sharing website.

Co-Creation is based on concepts by C.K. Prahalad3 and is explained as an interaction between
customers and companies to create a customized experience. Using the crowd to accomplish a
task that is too cumbersome for a few (as the Library of Congress does), would not fall under Co-
Creation. Lego are embracing the co-creation approach with their programmable Mindstorms kits.
Mindstorms fans create extensions, ideas, designs, they are writing blogs and even books about
their Mindstorms robots. Lego merely act as an enabler for the Mindstorms explorations of their
customers. The “right to hack” is written into the Mindstorms software license.

1
See http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html
2
See http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/collections/72157601355524315/
3
C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy (2004). The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with
Customers.

© Finpro 3


Open Innovation goes back to Henry Chesbrough’s book of the same name from 20034. Open
Innovation is defined as combining internal and external ideas as well as internal and external
paths to market to advance the development of new technologies.

While Open Innovation focuses on innovation, and Co-Creation favors a specific result (customer
experience), Crowdsourcing has a wider perspective and is – contrary to its name – not restricted
to employing a crowd.

What we refer to as Co-Doing in this paper casts a wide net and includes all sorts of external
networking (for instance with customers, specialists, suppliers) with the purpose of reaching better
results than would have been possible when relying only on internal know-how and skills.

As there is no one-size-fits-all, companies need to carefully select which approach makes sense
for them.

Benefits of Co-Doing
Co-Doing in the world of business is the natural consequence of several trends that have been
visible for a while.

First of all, individuals are increasingly used to networking; they are willing to contribute
something meaningful and want to express themselves.

Technology has brought the costs of communication down and makes it possible to interact from
anywhere at any time.

In the business world, firms face a demand for products and services that are customized per
consumer and, as if that was not challenging enough, frequently come in new versions and
updates. At the same time globalization has increased competition. As a Finnish company, you
compete directly with companies in low-cost countries. You also compete for talent on a global
scale.

Co-Doing brings the developments in the consumer world and technology world together and
stands to solve demands made on businesses.

By Co-Doing, a company can:

Increase innovative power through access to outside talent
Take an active part in the conversation about its brand
Respond to changes in a quick and flexible way
Solve challenges even with a lack of fully employed specialists
Remain competitive despite shortening time-to-market and life cycles of products

4
Henry Chesbrough (2003). Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from
Technology.

© Finpro 4


Is There a Choice?
Co-Doing in its various shapes gets a lot of media attention. So much so that the suspicious minds
wonder if Co-Creation and Open Innovation are a mere hype, a passing fad that does not justify
changing a company’s strategy.

We believe that waiting for Co-Doing to cease as a trend can be fatal. No matter whether
companies actively want to network or not, Co-Doing is changing the context in which
organizations operate.

Rigid supply chains turn into flexible value creation networks: The focus on innovative
results and outstanding consumer experience demands flexible partnerships: Work with
whom it makes sense for how long it makes sense – and reshuffle when it makes sense.
Companies can not control their brands: Firms can offer content for a brand, but they
can not control what users do with that content. Brands become the sum of interactions
with and between the people.
Expectations are set: Employees, consumers, citizens do not wait for a company to be
open - they take it for granted that they have a right to contribute their opinion, to adapt
products, to influence decisions. A company which ignores the technologically empowered
user cuts itself off.

Companies have little choice about the context they operate in. But they have numerous options to
position themselves.

Variables of Co-Doing
As mentioned above, Co-Doing is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Before a company rushes to open
its interfaces, important questions need to be answered and brought into line with a firm’s overall
strategy. The questions are the classic ones:

What do you want to do? Who is the best partner? How/in which form to interact?

Of course, no decision on Co-Doing must be made without looking at the Challenges and
Lessons. These crucial considerations deserve a separate chapter (see below). But first, we will
have a look at some examples to illustrate the dimension of What, Who and How.

What can be done together?
“Answer music related questions”, “Verify archive entries”, or “Tag a product image” are some of
the tasks posted to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk5 (MTurk) a marketplace where “requesters” find
people who take over repetitive or tedious tasks for very little money (usually for a few cents.)
These kinds of tasks are ideal candidates for Co-Doing.

Co-Doing is also at its best when it comes to solving societal or environmental challenges.
Consider the Let’s do it Event!6 in Estonia which was brought to life by the Estonian internet

5
http://www.mturk.com
6
http://www.teeme2008.ee/

© Finpro 5


entrepreneurs Ahti Heinla and Rainer Nolvak. They mobilized 50.000 people to clean up illegal
rubbish dumps all over the country on the 3rd of May in 2008.

Prominent examples of Co-Doing center around engaging “outsiders” in processes along the
product/service cycle, spanning from product innovation across prototyping and beta testing up
to process improvements, marketing and product support, with the ultimate aim of creating unique
consumer experience. One example that combines idea generation and marketing is the Sims
2/H&M Fashion Runway7 contest. H&M, the Swedish clothing company, invited players of the
popular online simulation game Sims 2 to create outfits for Sims avatars. The virtual styles were
voted on by the public and H&M designers - and the winning dress could be bought at selected
H&M stores worldwide for a limited time at a price of $14,95.

But Co-Doing with communities can go even further. Whole companies can be financed and run
by communities. Myfootballclub8 is an already famous example: In February 2008 club members
voted to complete the purchase of Ebbsfleet United Football Club for around £600,000. Now over
21,000 football devotees from 70 different countries own 75% of EUFC. A one year membership
costs £35 and entitles to voting on almost anything related to managing a football club – from team
formation to ticket pricing.

Experiments have shown that crowds are at least as accurate at predicting future events as
experts. That is why prediction markets like the simExchange9 have mushroomed. At the
simExchange, players buy and sell stocks in upcoming video game properties (with virtual money).
Thus, the website is a database of sales and game quality forecasts updated in real-time. And
forecasts are much cheaper than those of respective research institutions.

Through joint ventures and cooperations, many companies already have a practice of networking
with other companies across various stages of the product life cycle. Co-manufacturing projects
like the common plant of PSA Peugeot Citroen and Toyota, who jointly develop and produce small
cars for the European market and the case of bundled logistics (see text box “New forms of Co-
Doing in logistics”) show that there is a large untapped potential to raise the bar of innovativeness
and efficiency through sharing tasks – even with competitors..

While all sorts of tasks and processes can already be found under the Co-Doing umbrella, there is
no “automatic” success as we will later see.

7
http://fashionrunway.sims.yahoo.com/
8
http://www.myfootballclub.co.uk
9
http://www.thesimexchange.com

© Finpro 6


New forms of Co-Doing in Logistics – Marc Borremans, Head of
Construction, Logistics and Machinery at Finpro

Many companies have an established network of distribution partners.
Most of the time, Co-Doing happens vertically in the logistics value chain
(i.e. up- or downstream) and consists of solutions such as: just in time
(JIT) and vendor management inventories (VMI). A new development is
that collaboration takes place horizontally. This is, in a way, a logical step
as traditional ways to reach cost reductions and/or to offer added
services in logistics reached their limit. It is through innovative measures
– like cooperating with competitors – that the boundaries can be pushed.
One example is "Hecore”, the logistics collaboration between Henkel,
Colgate and Reckitt-Benckiser in France. These three companies decided
to group their end products in one shared warehouse (a manufacturing
consolidation center) and jointly deliver to common clients from there. As
a result, 75% of the trucks leaving the warehouse are full loads and the
number of operated trucks could be cut by 20%. Clients benefit from a
higher delivery frequency and, consequently, lower inventory levels.

These results are remarkable against the backdrop of current shopping
and retailing developments such as internet shopping, home delivery and
daily fresh supplies to shops. These trends have lead to decreasing
volumes per lot and, as a result, rising logistic costs. Bundling supply
streams is an effective solution.

Who is the best partner?
For some challenges it is best to involve as many people as possible, regardless of special
expertise. The clean-up event in Estonia is one such example. H.J. Heinz made a huge marketing
effort in 2007 to ask “everyone” to produce promotional video clips for Heinz Ketchup in its “Top
This” TV ad challenge. Even though clearly not everyone is able to make a video spot and not
everyone who sent in one of the more than 6000 spots was motivated to show Heinz Ketchup in a
favorable light, the brand was happy with the wide coverage it got and already ran a “take two” of
the challenge.10

For other tasks, companies get better results from interaction with a subset of their (potential)
customer base, with scientists, or other specialists. Procter & Gamble, a forerunner in Co-
Doing, uses the platform InnoCentive11 to reach scientists of all fields that help them solve
research problems. For ideas from the general public, P&G has set up the Connect & Develop12

10
http://www.topthistv.com/
11
http://www.innocentive.com
12
http://www.pgconnectdevelop.com/

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platform. And it employs Vocalpoint13, a network of over 600.000 mothers as early adopters of new
products for word-of-mouth marketing. And these are only a selection of the various communities
that Procter & Gamble reach through various forums and market places.

Co-Doing between companies also leads to innovative results and speeds up processes. In its
endeavor to envision, design and build the retail store of the future, Metro Group has worked with
80 companies so far (including big names like IBM and Nokia as well as SMEs) - a major
achievement that lead to the opening of the first “Future Store” in Krefeld, Germany.

Understanding the motivation of potential or desired Co-Doers is important as it has an impact on
how a company can incentivize consumers or partners to contribute, or credit collaborators for their
work.

How/in which form to interact?
Naturally, answers to the question what a company wants to do with whom affects which form
this interaction can have.

A common way to get users or experts committed is competitions, such as the mentioned
Sims2/H&M fashion contest and the TV ad challenge for Heinz Ketchup.

For one-off-assignments as well as perpetual tasks existing market exchanges like InnoCentive
or MTurk can be used.

To ensure a long time commitment of a community, consumer or expert forums which allow
continuous dialogue are ideal. While big companies like Dell (IdeaStorm) or P&G (Vocalpoint) can
set up their own platforms, smaller companies should consider establishing a presence in social
networks that are already frequented by the desired networking partners (like Facebook or Second
Life).

A seemingly simple way to engage people in decision making and for learning about their
preferences are ratings. As ebay demonstrated, ratings can be used as an instrument of quality
control. With Digg14, a popular platform for sharing online news, users can vote for content they
find interesting, so that popular sites (with the most “diggs”) are propelled to the top. The same
system can be used to let communities prioritize suggestions generated by its members.

For joint project work, web 2.0 inspired collaboration spaces proliferate that allow designers,
programmers or other knowledge workers of different companies to work on the same documents
from anywhere at anytime.

For some companies it is worth considering offering toolkits (Lego-style), so that customers can
conveniently customize products according to their taste. Other companies set up laboratories
where customers or business partners are invited to experiment with new solutions (as the
Shanghai Stock Exchange does in its lab).

13
http://www.vocalpoint.com
14
http://www.digg.com

© Finpro 8


Not every company may want to take an active role. Even then, an organization can learn much
about its customers’ or partners’ desires and dissatisfactions by employing tools for monitoring
social media. This is a relatively young field that will play an increasing role in the future as only
effective ways to analyze and prioritize will turn the content generated in various networks into
tangible results.

As technology is evolving, new creative ways for peering and sharing will be found. It is worth
keeping an eye open for new developments. It is also necessary to bear in mind that each tool and
each form of Co-Doing comes with its specific Do’s and Don’ts. Next, we will explore some Do’s
and Don’ts that apply across all of them.

Co-Doing in the Construction Industry - Marc Borremans, Head of
Construction, Logistics and Machinery at Finpro

Co-Doing in construction is not new: Expertise which you do not have
inside your company can and must be bought from others.

SME's are practically forced to co-operate when their goal is to take part
in major international construction and infrastructure projects. In order to
compete with large conglomerates, four elements are key: Scale,
References, Money and People. Co-Doing can be the answer for all of
them

Scale can be reached by partnering up. It is easier to find support in your
home country (a so called competitor) as you can more easily build trust.
For many tasks, Co-Doing with local contractors is of course needed in
order to control the price or to get acceptance from the local project
owner.

References are needed to sign up large orders abroad - and references
which prove that your company is a reliable Co-Doing partner are an
asset

Money: Financing large projects typically is difficult. Building (temporary)
business consortia can form an answer.

People: Lack of personnel is chronic in the construction industry. Co-
Doing can be a way out.

Challenges and Lessons
Co-Doing is still young. Expect to see more experimenting and also some business casualties
before textbook guidelines on how to do it right will emerge. If they ever do. Nevertheless, from the
cases and literature we studied we can already identify potential stumbling blocks on the way to
Co-Doing success.

© Finpro 9


Clear Leadership, Role assignments, and Rules
Finding the right balance between letting go and taking control is key for stimulating ideas and – on
the other hand – for getting things done. Cambrian House learned this the hard way.

In 2006, Cambrian House15 (Canada) began as a crowdsourcing community to discover new
business and technology ideas. 6935 ideas have been created and some of them turned into real
products. Like Gwabs, an online game, and Greedy or Needy, the “online wishing well”. However,
in May 2008 Cambrian House announced the sale of its intellectual property, assets, website and
remaining community to a venture firm for a fraction of the $7.75 million investors put into the
company16, which now focuses solely on further developing its existing products. Cambrian House
CEO Michael Sikorsky said that idea creation has never been a problem. But it turned out that the
community did not take over the responsibility for moving projects forward, something the founders
had expected. Clearly, the Cambrian House team and its community had diverging views on who
is doing what. Moreover, Cambrian House underestimated the preconditions (such as having
enough time) that have to be in place in order to fill an assigned role.

“We are smarter than me” by Barry Libert and Jon Spector17 represents another recent experiment
in harnessing the wisdom of the many. In this case the goal was to write guidelines on profiting
from business communities. A website was set up and “thousands of contributors” freely reported
interesting cases and discussed aspects of company networking. Nevertheless, the initiators finally
found that “the actual text of the book, the flow of the topics and the graphical design had to be
produced in the conventional way, rather than relying on the crowd to perform these functions.”
Obviously, someone still needs to be in charge and not everything can be democratic.

In their summary of lessons from Metro Group’s Future Stores initiative Tim Graczewski and Ard
Pieter de Man add another aspect: “The establishment of a clear leader with ultimate authority over
the project and the assignment of specific roles …mitigated infighting and redundant efforts within
the network.”18

These cases underline that, as in any other project, roles, tasks, rules and goals should be made
plain right from the start.

Understand Motivations
When consumers, experts or suppliers are asked to collaborate and invest time and brain they
should get something in return. Otherwise they will soon feel exploited. This “something” can be
virtual money, as in many prediction markets. Or real money, as in InnoCentive. It can be the right
to try out new products first, an exclusivity that the moms at P&G’s Vocalpoint enjoy.

15
http://www.cambrianhouse.com
16
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/12/when-crowdsourcing-fails-cambrian-house-headed-to-the-
deadpool/
17
Barry Libert and Jon Spector: We are smarter than me. 2008
18
Tim Graczewski and Ard-Pieter de Man: Partnering for the Future. The case of the METRO Future Store
Initiative. 2006

© Finpro 10


Many communities and market places (like MTurk) have a system in place to show how active or
knowledgeable a community member is. Enabling Co-Doers to increase their personal brand and
showcase their talent is a must-have feature for most communities and should, in one form or
another, also be brought to other forms of Co-Doing.

Very often, people contribute simply because they really want to have a better product, service or,
indeed, environment. This is what drove three percent of the Estonian population to clean their
country during the Let’s do it! event. This is also the reason Dell gets to think about 9502 ideas (as
of time of writing) which were posted to its IdeaStorm platform from (potential) customers. After
20.000 people voted for pre-installing Ubunto (a Linux operating system) on Dell computers, Dell
eventually launched this PC in Europe in 2007. Acting on the community’s free suggestions is
probably the best reward.

Co-Doing between companies – a consumer goods company and their suppliers, or competing
construction companies (see textbox 1) for instance – may seem simpler. Don’t they all want to
increase profits! Well, there may well be benefits that are not directly related to sales - like learning
something new, increasing the corporate brand, sharing risks in a pilot project, being more
attractive as an employer etc. It is good to know and highlight these added values to ensure
commitment.

Know when to step in
An individual’s motif for joining a Co-Doing project will not always be in line with the intention of the
company hosting that project. The TV ad contest for Heinz Ketchup for instance saw entries from a
wannabe presidential candidate, a sketch writer trying to popularize his work, people who said they
prefer mustard, and people who had hoped to get the attention of the jury with videos that fall
under the category “bad taste”. Of the more than 6000 entries, only roughly 4000 were accepted. -
Sorting out the good from the bad takes up resources.

The community may assist in spotting wrong-doers. Wikipedia employs its active community to
eradicate vandalism; at YouTube users can “flag” inappropriate content with the click of a button.
But then again, also the well-meaning users are prone to make errors.

Technological solutions (like word filtering) can be used to alert on undesirable content. But
ultimately, active community management is key to ensuring trust and safety. Having said that,
brands and projects should also be able to stomach a degree of chaos when venturing into the
open.

Take stock of resources
When talking of resources, thoughts usually hover around costs and budgets. When it comes to
Co-Doing, time may the bigger worry.

In a Deloitte survey19 of 140 companies who sponsor communities, forty-five percent of
respondents recognized that finding enough time to manage the community is one of the biggest
obstacles to making communities work.

19
Deloitte, Beeline, Society of New Communications: Tribalization of Business.2008

© Finpro 11


In fact, not only the time of the hosting company is critical. Also the time your partners can
potentially invest into a common project is part of the equation. And for all we can tell, getting
people’s time and attention will only become more challenging in the always-on knowledge society.
Companies will have to give desired collaborators a good reason why they should spend time with
exactly this project. This boils down to understanding motivations and giving incentives.

Companies also need to be realistic about what can be achieved within tight schedules. Matching
the What (e.g. Simple short tasks like tagging pictures vs. complex, time-consuming tasks like
creating a website) to the right Who (A self-selected crowd? A set of specialists?) and the right
How (channeling tasks through a market place? Working closely as a team?) is impossible without
a clear concept time.

Of course, financial resources are not negligible. Co-Doing does have a price. But, ideally, overall
costs can be brought down and/or are compensated by more efficient processes that lead to
superior products and services. Procter & Gamble found this to be the case: “Through connect &
develop – along with improvements in other aspects of innovation… - our R&D productivity has
increased by nearly 60%. Our innovation success rate has nearly doubled, while the cost of
innovation has fallen. R&D investment as a share of sales is down from 4,8% in 2000 to 3,4%
today.”20

Letting users create marketing for your company might be a different story. This is at least, what
Louise Story, a New York Times journalist assumes: “(C)ompanies have found that inviting
consumers to create their advertising is often more stressful, costly and time-consuming than just
rolling up their sleeves and doing the work themselves.”21 Indeed, H.J. Heinz ran expensive prime
time commercials for its “Top This” contest on TV and converted all labels on its ketchup bottles
into ads for the competition. An agency was hired to check which of the more than 6000 entries
qualified. The winning video was awarded with $57,000 and four runner-ups took $5,700 each in
prize money. Definitely, the contest did not come cheap. However, the competition also led to ten
million online views for qualified entries – about 120,000 hours of people interacting with the brand,
according to Smith Brothers Advertising, the agency that worked on the campaign. – H.J.Heinz
was happy enough to start a second contest.

Co-Doing and the Changing Media-Ecosystem – Pirjo Toivanen, Senior
Consultant, Software and Digital Media Industry

In Media it is now the time of interaction. One benefit for media houses is that by
being open to content from readers and viewers, they also learn directly, what
their audience is interested in. When it comes to publishing content from users,
mediation is very important to safeguard the quality level of the media brand, but
also to make sure that digital rights are respected. Very often, this processing of
user content is done through filtering software and – on top of that – through real
persons, who approve postings or videos before they go online. This approval

20
Larril Huston and Laril Sakab: Connect and Develop. Inside Procter& Gamble’s New Model for Innovation.
Harvard Business Review, 2006
21
Louise Story: The High Price of Creating Free Ads. New York Times, 26.5.2007

© Finpro 12


process can also be sourced to outside experts. In the case of Minick, these
experts are students: The Swiss company Minick (www.minick.net) offers mobile
operators service to run data bases where user generated content can be
uploaded/downloaded. The content creators receive money - or a reduction on
their mobile phone bill - based on the number downloads of their creations.
Minick employs a group of students to view videos people are producing and
screen them as part of Digital Rights Management (DRM). Students are seen as
ideal as they have watched all the latest movies, TV shows, listened to the latest
records, and thus they easily recognize the bits which cannot be commercially
used without royalties.

Guarding intellectual property and sensitive data
When the sale of Cambrian House, a greenhouse for crowdsourcing ideas, was announced on
TechCrunch22, one commentator, Peter Urban, contended that in an open forum like Cambrian
House people would keep their great ideas to themselves and only share mediocre brain waves:
“I’ll give you my second rate ideas, but not the winners which I’ll work on myself.”

This attitude illustrates that the way intellectual property rights are handled will have an impact on
the quality of input and level of interaction that companies can expect. No matter whether a firm
follows a creative commons approach or negotiates licenses - the rules need to be clear.

Likewise, a company needs to revisit its privacy and security policies when inviting partners to
contribute to web-based collaboration spaces. Despite all the transparency, partners expect their
personal or sensitive data to be safe. Even in networks like Facebook, where users report about
their love life and party escapades, people are sensitive to privacy. So when Facebook made web
purchases of its users visible to their friends (the infamous Beacon initiative23), it faced a mass
protest, apologized and withdrew the feature.

Finding the right balance between openness and security is paramount to ensure trust and loyalty,
and of course, regulatory compliance.

Ensure Diversity
To be sure, Crowdsourcing has its critics and very often, critique focuses on the issue of “group
think” (a term coined in 1952 by sociologist William H. Whyte). The main idea: If you put a group of
like-minded people together, creativity will come to a halt, because it becomes more difficult to
think out-of-the-box. As group members do not want to be seen as foolish or do not dare to
contradict other group members, important viewpoints get lost and the resulting consensus is
mediocre, at best.

The great thing about Co-Doing is that it facilitates collaboration with a mix of people who differ for
instance because they work in different industries, because they have a user perspective instead
of a sales perspective, because they are from dissimilar cultures. It is this “other” perspective
which enables to challenge and enhance the dominant thinking inside an organization.

22
See Footnote 16
23
Louise Story and Brad Stone: Facebook Retreats on Online Tracking. New York Times, 30.11.2007

© Finpro 13


But it is true that Co-Doing can, after a time, lead to herd behaviour. “(S)etting new targets,
bringing in new partners, and making the most of co-opetition can avoid complacency,” is an
advice drawn from the Future Store project.24

To combat uniformity, techniques for unsettling comfort-zone behaviour that are now taught in
creativity seminars will find their way into the workplace, online and offline. And so will metrics that
measure how engaged, connected or productive a given community is.

But first of all, companies need to encourage and foster a culture that values diverse, creative and
critical thinking, and a culture that values the learning opportunities in mistakes.

Get Ready for Transformation
A general consensus about Co-Doing in its various forms is that it has a transformational power.
Starting to co-create will not be like moving from a trot to a gallop. It will be more like moving from
crawling to walking upright. Allow for some time to learn how to use your feet and to recognize the
enhanced opportunities and new threats.

One transformation that Co-Doing necessitates is the development of new skills. Managing
communities, bringing together various partners has so far typically not been part of companies’
tasks. New structures for decision making, new leadership skills and new recruiting criteria will
develop, to name but a few of the new “hardware” upgrades a company can expect to undergo.
Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer, turned into “a high-end systems integrator”25 while developing
the Boeing 787 model with its suppliers.

A company’s “software”, its culture and values may be even more affected by the move towards
transparency and openness.

Opportunity: Enable Co-Doing
Opportunities not only lie in networking. Opportunities also lie in enabling others to network. First
and foremost, this could be done by providing technology, be it in the form of collaboration
spaces, rating systems, monitoring tools, tools for the visualization of communication flows, or for
ensuring security and privacy of data. Technology can also help to measure the effectiveness (and
ultimately return on investment) of collaboration. There is much room for new innovative solutions!

Whatever solution is employed, it will not appeal to users (on both ends) if the design is not user-
friendly. Simple and intuitive operation is a key requirement. This means that providing design
services is another major opportunity to thrive in the networked economy.

Even more important than technology and design are the people themselves. Not everyone is a
born networker. And even intuitive technology will need some getting used to. Training, coaching,
personal development services will therefore play an important role.

24
See Footnote 18
25
http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Case-Studies/Boeing-New-Jet-New-Way-of-Doing-Business/

© Finpro 14


Whole new job profiles will emerge, the Community Manager is an example. And companies may
not have the capability to manage Crowdsourcing competitions or co-manufacturing projects on
their own, which means that specialist service providers will be engaged. One example is
TopCoder26, a market place specialized in software coding competitions.

Experience also shows that, despite the ease of doing business in virtual teams, people still like to
have some real contact. Event organizers are asked to offer not only traditional fairs and
conferences, but also new types of events that stimulate sharing and networking - barcamps and
business speed dating are examples.

Conclusion
Co-Doing has many faces. Most prominent in the press – and admittedly also in this paper - is Co-
Doing with users, consumers, citizens. Co-Doing with suppliers, NGOs and other stakeholders,
with brands from other industries and, indeed, with competitors also open up new possibilities.

Co-Doing should not be embraced because it is the latest fashion. Co-Doing is not about
interacting for interaction’s sake. Co-Doing is about being more cost-efficient, more innovative, and
more competitive. Which is to say that Co-Doing should be considered by all firms, big and small,
whether they are producing consumer goods or heavy machinery. And this consideration must
take into account that Co-Doing is not risk-free. It challenges established ways of doing things and
puts an organization leadership and culture to the test.

About Finpro
Finpro is a consulting organization focused on accelerating the internationalization of Finnish
companies while managing the risks involved. Our aim is to guarantee that Finnish companies,
especially small and medium size companies, have access to high quality, comprehensive
internationalization services around the world.

We operate through a unique global network: over 50 Finland Trade Centers in 40 countries as
well as in Finland.

Related Finpro White paper
“Changing the Fundamentals for Long Term Profitability and Growth”

26
http://www.topcoder.com/

© Finpro 15

Co-Doing - A Networked Approach to Doing Business

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