Overcoming the barriers that hinder co-creation and innovation in outsourcing partnerships
Establishing the right conditions for co-creation and innovation in outsourcing partnerships is crucial. It requires the upfront investment of time and resource.
Considerations for success include:
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- Alignment: Ensure agreement on the shared vision, goals and objectives.
- Organisational culture and structure: Address rigid hierarchies and bureaucratic structures. Foster a culture that supports innovation, experimentation and risk-taking.
- Power dynamics: Equal participation from both parties is essential to balance power dynamics. Avoid the blame game as set-backs are inevitable when trying something new.
- Intellectual property: Develop clear agreements and mechanisms for addressing intellectual property concerns about ownership, protection and the fair distribution of the outcomes.
- Discuss challenges: Welcome difficult conversations. Effective communication is vital to avoid ambiguity or misinterpretations.
- Build trust: Trust is earned over time through transparency, honesty and delivering on commitments.
- Resource: Find ways to pool and leverage resources across the partnership. Ensure appropriate resource is made available for the implementation and embedding of new ways of working.
- Skills and expertise: Identify skill gaps early on, provide training or seek external expertise to help overcome this barrier.
Challenging the status quo in partnerships
The nature of co-creation is highly entrepreneurial as the process itself lends to the creation of something new. It is a creative and innovative process that brings the right players together at the right points in time. It attracts challengers who see new ways in which they can bring value and seek value in return and can be in the form of simplifying tasks and processes, decreasing costs, accelerating timelines, changing cultural norms and humanising ownership.
If the conditions are right, it can enable deeper thinking and reveal fresh insights from surfacing the unspoken and secret narratives of teams and organisations. At its best, this is an ongoing value exchange through an iterative process
When co-creation is applied in partnerships, it drives an entrepreneurial culture. It helps break down silo mentality and gets everyone actively involved. It also motivates taking ownership of new creations and ensuring that they succeed. If embraced, it allows teams, customers, stakeholders, partners and individuals to feel like they are part of something incredible.
Working on a common co-created output creates a sense of belonging and community around what is achieved. Co-created outputs have high impact as they often involve the end-users as co-creators.
This generates a powerful systemic dynamic of working together on something meaningful, which in turn spurs on community, shared ownership and a sense that they’re in the driver’s seat of what the output does for them as truly co-creative partnership team.
