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This case study of a fashion-design company aims to show how a co-creation initiative produces competitive advantage by nurturing creativity, expanding the company’s innovation capabilities and enabling it to engage with both taste-making customers and designers from anywhere in the world.

In 2009, Fronteer Strategy, a Netherlands-based market-analysis firm published a conceptual framework for identifying specifically how a firm’s processes and initiatives employ co-creation. This case looks at how this theoretical framework compares with the actual complexities of the co-creation process developed by Own Label.

Own Label’s co-creation approach is a hybrid model that utilizes more than one type of co-creation across its fashion-design process.

What makes co-creation in design-intensive industries a disruptive approach is the democratization of the process by which design choices are made.

Own Label is utilizing its hybrid models of co-creation in order to strategically position its self in niche markets, adapt faster to trends, as well as to be a design leader.

The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to co‐creation theory by integrating conceptual insights from the management and marketing literatures that are both concerned with co‐creation phenomena. It aims to develop a reference model for comparing how different organizations organize and manage their co‐creation ventures. It also aims to apply the authors' framework to four distinct cases that illustrate the differences in co‐creation practice within different co‐creation environments.

The authors compare four different companies based on case profiles. Each company is employing its own distinct approach to co‐creating. The authors employ a method mix including literature analysis, structured interviews, document and web site analysis, as well as participation.

The reference model offers a set of useful dimensions for case‐based inquiry. The case comparisons show how firms may decide to systematise and manage a mix of co‐creation activities within B2B versus B2C contexts, utilising either crowd‐sourced or non‐crowd‐sourced approaches. Further, the case comparisons suggest that there are less differences in B2B versus B2C co‐creation as compared with crowd‐sourced versus non‐crowd‐sourced approaches. Ultimately, implementation decisions in one dimension of co‐creation design (e.g. whom to involve in co‐creation) will affect other dimensions of implementation and governance (e.g. how much intimacy) and thus how co‐creation needs to be managed.

The paper presents case comparisons utilising B2B versus B2C, as well as crowd versus non‐crowd‐sourcing examples of co‐creation and an original decision support framework for assessing and comparing co‐creation choices.

An important task for all strategy leaders contemplating the use of co-creation is to determine how well the numerous co-creation project-design choices available to them align with their strategic priorities.

In order to implement co-creation, firms need to assess how their projects or initiatives support their strategic commitments and priorities. To this end, the authors offer managers a practical, easy-to-use assessment framework.

Executives should consider their approach to co-creation in terms of crafting and managing a portfolio of initiatives to be categorized and managed differently according to their strategic significance – high, medium or low.

A six-question assessment framework was inductively derived from an extensive literature review (113 articles) focusing on practices associated with co-creation and stakeholder involvement. Though they do not represent an exhaustive list of categories for assessment, they do, however, identify strategically important choices involved in designing co-creation ventures.

The six-question assessment framework is applied to the case of the Xerox-P&G co-innovation partnership, which illustrates how such significant co-creation initiatives might be profiled, and their main design choices analyzed.