Co-creation is a new way of working and for this reason it is crucial to have a clear starting point for the project. To help take your internal stakeholders on the journey it is important to involve them early and allow them to shape the specification of the project and share existing knowledge. Identify a core decision making group who will be responsible for working directly with consumers and ensure the outputs from the process are pushed through the business.

2. Give it Time

The best co-creation projects happen when your stakeholder team takes their role in this new research process seriously. This means that at each stage of the project the client team needs to makes the time to give thoughtful feedback on their direct interaction with consumers and work in partnership with the agency to shape the project on a daily basis.

3. Gain Buy In

When using a new methodology like co-creation it is important that clients present project updates/findings on a regular basis at director level to ensure that the project has internal momentum. A powerful way to bring the power of co-creation to life for internal senior stakeholders is to arrange for consumers to present back their ideas to them perhaps at the end of a workshop or back in the boardroom.

4. Let Go

From a client perspective the main feedback is to make sure you embrace and enjoy the direct interaction with consumers. In this co-creation environment consumers are encouraged to talk to each other rather than to researchers; opinions are offered, agreed with, disputed, challenged and developed. By working in a more natural communication mode you hear views expressed in real voices. Importantly consumers and clients end up discussing things and asking questions they didn’t even know existed or thought that we wanted to ask at the outset.