Co-creation has from its inception been synonymous with customer co-creation. It is about acknowledging the potential of the end user as a co-creative or co-developer in the innovation process. Co-creation entails the integral engagement of customers through the different cycles of the innovation process.

In practice customer co-creation is often limited to the ideation phase, the phase of netting the first insights and getting an initial grasp of potential solutions. This sounds pretty straightforward: Just call upon your audience to contribute their ideas, filter and cluster the useful bits and start developing.

This is what actually happens, under the cloak of crowdsourcing: Give us your idea and if it proves to be valuable, we will reward you. This exchange is often devoid of any conversation, apart from the perfunctory remarks from a moderator. The exchange is stripped down to a digital selection mechanism. It is however the conversation that makes co-creation truly valuable.

Customer-bred solutions are rarely clear-cut and turnkey. Most often we see rudimentary ideas, fragments of insight, particles of creativity that need to be amalgamated. This is where conversation comes in. Conversation is a process of sharing, questioning, amending and enriching each other’s contributions. This endless cascade of comments is how collective intelligence manifests itself. Co-creation is not just about detecting the one big idea. It is about mobilizing the full intellectual weight of a community around several promising ideas. Conversation, as much as aggregation, is central to co-creation.

So if you are thinking about harnessing the creative potential of your audience, you’d better prepare yourself. You cannot delegate a dialogue to a few community managers or market research people. You need to able to immerse yourself in the conversation, by enabling a broad section of your people to engage openly. Moreover, the art of conversation has to be learnt. People nowadays often talk in a stop-motion manner, unaccustomed to pursue a line of thought and extend a dialogue beyond a single salvo of stimulus-response. When you act like this, you create the impression that you are only interested in the transaction of an idea and not in cultivating a relationship.

Dialogue is the epitome of engagement. It proves that you are really interested in your customers. Research upon research shows that genuine attention is one of the key motivators for customers to prolong a co-creation effort. Don’t look for goodies to tempt your customers: Just start talking and listening.