A prosumer / co-creation 2 x 2: engagement focus, locus of value creation

I’ve been looking at a variety of potential frameworks in relation to the topic of prosumerism / customer co-creation. I linked to a couple last week, and have developed a few of my own over the past few years, but I continue to find 2 x 2s to be an interesting way to explore the issue (and many issues for that matter). In turn, I’ve been playing around with a couple that I’ll be writing about over the next few weeks. Here’s one of them (some of them might have to be moved around a bit, but I think you’ll get the idea…):

The X-axis looks at what the prosumer engagement focus is on – wisdom of crowds vs. uniquely qualified minds. Regular readers of this blog will notice I bring this topic up a lot, because I think it’s very important. In some cases, companies are looking to engage a large community of people, and it is the collective action of the group that creates value; in others, companies are looking to connect with a particularly uniquely qualified mind to deal with a certain problem. “Preferred” member communities – i.e. a select group of customers that companies engage with to help develop the value proposition – fall somewhere in between.

The Y-axis builds off of the OMC report referenced last week – is the “locus of value creation” prosumer driven, or company driven? For example, the value on Digg is almost entirely created by the activity of prosumers on the site; if you look at something like the “Innovative with Kraft” program, the company is looking for ideas that they can use to create value (i.e. new products). These seem like two very different things to me.

Next in this series: X-axis the same, Y-axis focused on incentives (intangible vs. financial).

Tagged as: 2x2, co-creation, communities, customer communities, marketing, prosumers, social media