Co-creating the future through design thinking: Deconstructing the consumer co-creation process
Maria Gradillas, Llewellyn D. W. Thomas
kHUB post date: May 2025
Originally published: December 4, 2024 (PDMA JPIM • Vol 42, Issue 3 • May 2025)
Read time: 75 minutes
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Consumer co-creation, an approach in which consumers and organizations jointly innovate, can yield valuable knowledge about consumers' needs and how to satisfy these needs. Yet, innovating with consumers is challenging due to their varying levels of commitment, skills, and motivations. In this research, we focus on challenges we cluster as cognition- and affect-driven and examine how these challenges can be addressed using a design thinking approach. Building on the insights gained from interviews with key co-creation stakeholders (n = 73) and three focus groups with experts in design thinking and co-creation, we develop a grounded process model facilitating co-creation with consumers. More specifically, we distill three co-creation phases (labeled as co-creating context, content, and confluence), consisting of eight constituent activities and resulting dynamics that are cognitive or affective in nature. The distilled affective dynamics manifest in ideation confidence, empathy for diverse perspectives, pleasurable engagement, and being creatively inspired; the distilled cognitive dynamics manifest in an expanded knowledge base and an enhanced ability to analyze and evaluate information. Our grounded model is integrative and responds to calls to further examine affective influences within innovation and organization. Furthermore, our research advances the theoretical substance of design thinking by explaining underlying mechanisms at play that make design thinking an effective approach. Finally, our results add to the literature on consumer co-creation by developing a robust process model that leverages design thinking and adopts a multistakeholder approach to optimize consumer co-creation outcomes. In terms of managerial implications, our research presents a structured framework with phases and (micro)activities that will help organizations to actively involve consumers in their innovation process.
Practitioner Points
- We have distilled an integrative process model for consumer co-creation, consisting of three distinct phases and constituent (micro)activities. With this process model, we update managers' toolkit for innovation.
- Our research suggests the importance of actively managing both cognition and affect during innovation processes.
- Our research shows the relevance of leveraging design thinking expertise during consumer co-creation.
- Our research shows the relevance of a multistakeholder approach for consumer co-creation in which participating consumers and organization stakeholders are carefully curated.