Since I visited The Mass Customization and Personalization Conference in Helsinki last month, I am puzzled by the confounding variety of definitions.

Joseph Pine told me he did not understand the whole fuzz about co-creation. According to him, co-creation is simply the act of a producer and consumer jointly shaping the fulfilment of a proposition. This ‘experience’ is becoming more and more commonplace as product delivery increasingly relies on a measure of cooperation and added value on the part of the user.

For others, co-creation is about facilitating customers to redesign their own brand or product item by assembling a personal mix out of a fixed set of ingredients. This comes dangerously close to what I understood mass-customization to be…

In my view, co-creation is defined by five key elements:

• Reverse integration in the value chain of (user) experience and creativity
• Aggregation of tacit knowledge within a constituency
• Peer-to-peer cross-pollination of insights & ideas
• Synthesis of contributions into a limited set of actions
• Collective experience of cumulative effort

Maybe some of you find this definition too narrow. But demarcating the territory of a nascent discipline is not unwise, if only because it forces one to constantly rethink the essence in the face of changing realities.

Co-creation is prone to inflation, as is mass-customization. This should not surprise us. Both are rapidly expanding fields, absorbing new perspectives and disciplines. Where co-creation traditionally took the outside-in perspective of consumers as amateur-experts, mass customization was more concerned by the implications of personalized demand in terms of production and modularity. Now the twain increasingly meet and things get confusing…

I believe that in many circumstances, co-creation will act in conjunction with mass-customization. Co-creation can prepare the ground, both in a functional and psychological sense, for community-driven mass-customization. Lego remains one of the quintessential examples. It is time to examine how the two can be more neatly matched.

As for the conference, the next edition will be called The Mass Customization, Personalization & Co-creation Conference. So much for writings on the wall…