The Co Creation Edge

Rapid changes in business along with better informed customers threaten the traditional sales and procurement process. Thousands of sales and procurement people are threatened with extinction, yet all is not destined to be doom and gloom. A new way of partnering between these two roles can, in fact, create significant value for both organizations. Sales and procurement professionals have a bright future ahead of them if they can respond to six trends that the authors have identified in the business-to-business world. Each trend offers an opportunity to develop a new skill for sales and procurement professionals and adopt a new practice. Because these practices are not yet widely adopted as “best practices”, the authors coin them “next practices.” These trends include: working together to solve complex problems; organizing problem-solving networks across company boundaries; creating processes for live cross-company engagement; facilitating data driven, cross-company interactions fed by digital platforms; providing new personal experiences for individuals and lastly (and most importantly) creating new sources of value for firms. If these trends are adopted by organizations, the ability to co-create means providing significant value to both the sales management team at the supplier and the purchasing management team at the customer. With the alternative being that these job functions will be replaced by web-based or channel-based alternatives that will do most of what they do today at a fraction of the cost. Increasingly, there is no middle ground anymore. SAMs and senior buyers will either evolve into high value-added sales and procurement professionals, or disappear.

​The original point that differentiates this text from otherwise similar texts is that it looks at the building of smart cities from the viewpoint of an interchange of knowledge among companies in different industries, or “Ba” as shared context in motion, and emphasizes that the resulting value becomes a source of new corporate competitive advantage. In recent years numerous publications have appeared that analyze smart cities from various perspectives including urban planning and administration, network theory, and innovation. However, few are academic texts that approach the subject from the viewpoint of corporate competitive advantage against a theoretical background in management studies, as this one does. This book is the first full-scale academic work to analyze smart cities from the viewpoint of corporate competitive advantage. Research into corporate competitive advantage includes the positioning and the resource-based views, with the former focusing on companies’ external environment and the latter on their internal resources. Although these theories’ foci of attention necessarily differ, they both developed as tools for analyzing companies’ relative merits and their chances of succeeding in the marketplace, and they take the common premise that competitive advantage is built through competition among companies. In contrast, this book sees corporate competitive advantage as arising not through competition but through “co-creation” among companies. It differs in its approach from existing theories in thinking that emphasizing co-creation over competition enables an analysis that better describes actual conditions when considering smart cities and corporate competitive advantage. Put another way, when new values arise from attempts to exchange and fuse knowledge, expertise, and other factors at the “ba” where companies from different industries collaborate, these values are surely brought about through co-creation among companies. Another point regarding this book’s original perspective on competitive advantage is its emphasis on the relationship between the creation of social value and competitive advantage. The question of the extent to which socially useful values can be created in the markets of the 21st century is closely linked to corporate competitive advantage. The issues of building smart cities and corporate competitive advantage are themes that this perspective can firmly grasp. This book intends to take up three different projects from among the smart-city building developments taking shape in Japan, and undertake case studies based on the theoretical framework outlined above. The central themes will analyze the mechanism of co-creation among companies and the relationship of created value to competitive advantage. This analysis aims to demonstrate one model relating to corporate competitive advantage in the 21st century.

The German Academic Association for Production Technology (WGP) annually invites researchers coming from its institutes and from industry to contribute peer reviewed papers in the field of production technology. This congress proceedings provides recent research results and findings on leading-edge manufacturing processes. Main aim of this scientific congress is to push forward existing borders in production and to provide novel solutions of "Production at the Leading Edge of Manufacturing Technology. The subtitle “Technology-Based Sustainable Production for Circular Economy” of this year’s congress emphasizes challenges for global productions in the light of climate change and resource scarcity. Different sessions were held on the topics Environmentally neutral production (e.g. energy and material efficiency) Resilient Value Creation Systems Biointelligence Digitization as an Enabler for Sustainable Production Production Technologies for a Circular Economy

In this book, leading experts discuss innovative components of complexity theory and chaos theory in economics. The underlying perspective is that investigations of economic phenomena should view these phenomena not as deterministic, predictable and mechanistic but rather as process dependent, organic and always evolving. The aim is to highlight the exciting potential of this approach in economics and its ability to overcome the limitations of past research and offer important new insights. The book offers a stimulating mix of theory, examples and policy. By casting light on a variety of topics in the field, it will provide an ideal platform for researchers wishing to deepen their understanding and identify areas for further investigation.

Co-creation is a major trend in management, yet no one seems to truly know what it is. With numerous examples and a Q&A section, this book explains exactly what co-creation is and how it differs from other forms of collaboration. To do so, it covers three main topics: innovation, trust and commitment. With regard to the first, co-creation creates a sense of psychological security by treating all participants as equals, the most important prerequisite for finding innovative solutions. In terms of trust, co-creation builds on individual strengths. People who believe in each other’s abilities trust each other. Lastly, co-creation allows people to arrive at win-win solutions, which is the foundation for taking personal ownership. The book is intended for executives, HR and organizational managers, and those responsible for corporate transformation who want to implement co-creation in a very concrete way, as well as anyone interested in co-creation in general.

"This book presents advanced research on the concept of creativity using virtual teams, demonstrating a specific focus and application for virtual teams. It presents tools, processes, and frameworks to advance the overall concept that leveraging ideas from different locations in an organization and within extended networks is based on creativity, which can deliver innovation"--Provided by publisher.

A fundamental shift is underway that will change how we conceive of value. In an era of increasing interconnectedness, individuals, as opposed to institutions, stand at the center of value creation. To adapt to this tectonic shift, organizations can no longer unilaterally devise products and services. They must engage stakeholders—from customers and employees to suppliers, partners, and citizens at large—as co-creators. Co-creation guru Venkat Ramaswamy and Kerimcan Ozcan call for enterprises to be mindful of lived experiences, to build engagement platforms and management systems that are designed for creative collaboration, and to develop "win more-win more" strategies that enhance our wealth, welfare, and, well-being. Richly illustrated with examples of co-creation in action, The Co-Creation Paradigm provides a blueprint for the co-creative enterprise, economy, and society, while presenting a conceptual framework that will guide organizations across sectors in adopting this transformational approach. Challenging some of our most deeply held ideas about business and value, this book outlines the future of "business as usual."

This book offers new insights into value co-creation in the context of sport management. Based on recent developments in academia (e.g. service-dominant logic) and empirical evidence, it highlights the significance of customers and other firms and organisations (service networks) for the creation of high quality products and services. Five articles shed more light on various aspects of value co-creation including a sport value framework, customer-to-customer value co-creation platforms, fan consumption communities, value co-destruction, and coopetition strategies. They also broaden our understanding of the processes that lead to joint value creation by different parties. In addition, the authors present insights that can be helpful in practice, and describe guidelines and strategies that are in line with the concept of value co-creation. In so doing, this book helps to develop better theories, and to provide guidance for sport managers for the design of value creation as a collaborative relational and dynamic process between multiple actors. This book was published as a special issue of European Sport Management Quarterly.