Yesterday’s New Product Development conference (organised by Research Conferences — Ed.) was a good event with a nice mix of agency and client side researchers and NPD specialists. I ended up on a panel with Esther Garland from Face and Marilena D’Amone from Reckitt Benckiser discussing the merits or otherwise of co-creation.

One of the issues discussed was whether co-creation is a buzzword or something more tangible. The truth is, it’s a bit of both.

If fully embraced by a company it should end up as a philosophy that pervades the organisation and means that customers are bought in (both literally and metaphorically) to the organisation and its decision making processes. For instance, we recently did a proposal for a company to set up consumer connect sessions with board of directors – that really is bringing the customer inside the business.

Of course, there is the danger that co-creation gets treated simply as another tickbox on the research methodology page, and all we do is ask people for their ideas a little more openly than we normally would in a typical focus group.

The feeling from conference delegates, however, was that the former was winning out.