The Power of Co-Creation: Build It with Them to Boost Growth, Productivity, and Profits

Francis Gouillart is a co-founder and president of the Experience Co-Creation Partnership (ECC Partnership), a services firm built to implement the co-creation ideas with corporate clients and public organizations around the world. ECC Partnership is the vehicle Mr. Gouillart and his team use for concept development, publication, speeches, management education, workshops, and development of consulting tools. The firm has an office in Concord, MA, and one in Paris, France. The ECC Partnership has an exclusive global agreement with PRTM Consulting on the global application of the co-creation family of concepts to consulting. Mr. Gouillart has personally consulted with many large global organizations in the last 30 years, including DuPont, BASF, Monsanto, Mead, ExxonMobil, La Poste, Credit Agricole, Wells Fargo, Brown Brothers & Harriman (BBH), Carhartt, Avery-Dennison and Nokia. Mr. Gouillart is co-author (with Venkat Ramaswamy) of the newly published book “The Power of Co-Creation” (Simon & Schuster Free Press, October 2010) and the Harvard Business Review article “Becoming a Co-Creative Enterprise” (November 2010). Mr. Gouillart is also co-author (with James Kelly) of the book “Transforming the Organization,” published by McGraw-Hill, which reached the top of BusinessWeek’s best-seller list in 1995. He also co-wrote (with Frederick Sturdivant) the Harvard Business Review article “Spend a Day in the Life of Your Customers,” (January-February 1994). He also authored the popular book “Stratégie pour une Entreprise Compétitive” (Editions Economica, Paris), which was named Best Strategy Book of the Year by the French Association of Strategic Planners (AFPLANE) in 1989. He is considered a leading authority on the topic of co-creation, strategy, innovation, transformation, and process design. His blog, “The Co-Creation Effect,” can be found at francisgouillart.com. Mr. Gouillart received an MBA from the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business and currently resides in Concord, Massachusetts. Venkat Ramaswamy is Hallman Fellow of Electronic Business and Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. He is a globally recognized thought leader, idea practitioner, and eclectic scholar with wide-ranging interests in innovation, strategy, marketing, branding, IT, operations, and the human side of the organization. He is a prolific author of numerous articles—including the popular 2000 Harvard Business Review article “Co-opting Customer Competence” and the 2003 MIT-PricewaterhouseCoopers award-winning Sloan Management Review article “The New Frontier of Experience Innovation” (both coauthored with C. K. Prahalad) as well as the 2009 Emerald Literati award-winning Strategy & Leadership article “Leading the Transformation to Co-Creation of Value”, and the 2010 article in the Harvard Business Review on “Building the Co-Creative Enterprise, based on his new book The Power of Co-Creation: Build It With Them to Boost Growth, Productivity, and Profits (Free Press, October 2010; co-authored with Francis Gouilart). His previous award-winning book in 2004, The Future of Competition (with C. K. Prahalad), introduced co‑creation as a revolutionary business concept. Venkat is also a sought-after speaker and a mentor to global firms seeking to become a co-creative enterprise. He has helped several organizations across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America conceive and execute new business ideas through co‑creation, and build management capabilities for co‑creation inside their organizations.