"What we've been..." PART II
Welcome to the second edition of our more-or-less-twice-a-year newsletter, inspired by- and reporting on ‘What we’ve been...’ up to. Have seven months already flown by since the last installment? Apparently so. Wow, how times fly...
back to top ...SHARING
As you may remember, Martijn wrote a white paper called ”Co-creation’s 5 Guiding Principles
” last year - a great read both as an introduction to the topic AND for professionals to read about our perspective. Not only has it been downloaded thousands of times, it has launched Martijn into the international ‘speaker’s circuit’: in the past few months he has lectured at seminars on co-creation and mass customisation all around Europe. It is available for download on the Fronteer website. Please do let us know your thoughts and comments when you have a chance to read it.
back to top ...PREPARING
We are currently preparing a “Co-creation Crash Course
” - a series of intimate and inspiring events about Co-creation in business. Aimed at managers facing the big “Ok I want co-creation, but where on earth to start ?” question, the sessions will include discussion of best practices, our models, approach, experience and latest insights as well as case presentations by Fronteer clients! Three dates in Amsterdam planned so far: March 24th, 31st and April 7th. Stay tuned to our weblog (or feel free to contact us) for more information.
back to top ...RESEARCHING
Over the past half a year, we’ve been noticing that there’s “some kind of relationship” between our work on brand development and our innovation projects. To explore this ‘gut feel’ we partnered with one of Holland’s finest research agencies, Ruigrok Netpanel. Together we researched the relationship between (a) the perceived open-ness (or accessibility), (b) innovativeness and (c) attractiveness of brands.
We were pleasantly surprised to find an almost linear relationship between the three! The precise mechanisms of this relationship will require some further (academic) work to figure out, but we’re happy to know that ‘we’re on to something’ here: brands that innovate by being open & accessible are more popular than brands that aren’t... great news for our clients then. The research and results can be found on our blog post
or in the (Dutch) press release.
back to top ...ADMIRING
We recently met Jamain Brigitha, founding director and curator of Dream Amsterdam Foundation and we were fascinated by her goal of ‘creating collective experiences’ and ‘adding to the discourse of the city’ through the development of art in public spaces - rather than works being hidden away between museum walls. Each year, Dream Amsterdam selects an acclaimed international contemporary artist who gets to use the city of Amsterdam as a studio, canvas, material, source of inspiration and exhibition space. Interestingly, the locations and perceivers become part of the work itself. This year, Dream Amsterdam featured the work of the amazing Danish photographer/artist Peter Funch.
We decided to help promote Dream Amsterdam and its work: the art works of all three Dream Amsterdam editions by Spencer Tunick, Ryoji Ikeda and Peter Funch will be available to see and buy at Fronteer HQ. Stay tuned for more details. www.DreamAmsterdam.nl
back to top ...WEAVING
Together with a group of local players in government, education and the denim industry, we’ve initiated an ambitious new project called ‘House of Denim’. Its objective is to set up a sustainable denim factory in the Amsterdam area that will promote and learn about sustainable production, improve crafts education and create beautiful jeans in the process.
We developed the current concept last quarter, based on expert interviews and online input from the denim community. Work continues with an expert co-creation workshop & seminar during Amsterdam International Fashion Week, followed by the development of an action-oriented business plan. Co-creation will remain a central theme, to which numerous brands have already committed support. Click here to read more about the project.
back to top ...CO-CREATING
In our industry, the real magic happens when clients take us along on a frontier-breaking adventure of their own. Cool as a (perma-frozen) cucumber, our Finnish favorites at Nokia are silently setting a new standard in co-creation. The approach we developed for co-creation platforms relating to ‘Creativity on the Move’ and Augmented Reality this past half year have scored 3 proverbial gold stars on each of our Guiding Principles: (1) Select the Best (2) Inspire to Participate (3) Connect Creative Minds (4) Share Results and (5) Continue Development.
What’s so brilliant, you may ask? Nokia’s strategic commitment to co-creation (for the purpose of strategic innovation) has given us the freedom to create clever opportunities for co-creation with THE best thinkers on the planet and to design structures for involving them on a long-term basis. Putting their money where their mouth is, Nokia is leading the way on IP issues too: the ever-tiresome question of NDA’s and confidentiality has been answered with a 1-page, equal partners/’equal rights to use’ commitment. Now that’s progress! Check out our video of the co-creation work at the official Maemo website.
back to top ...GRADUATING
Thanks to our close contacts at some of Europe’s best universities, we are able to attract some of the ‘brightest lights’ to do their graduation thesis projects at Fronteer. Gabriela Aguirrezabal researched the barriers, opportunities, concerns and stakeholders in companies decision to engage in co-creation. One of the interesting results has been a list of common barriers & fears that prevent moving forward, as well as a model called the Co-creation Blackboard (that’s being test-driven by our core clients right now!) for assessing which stakeholders to involve when. More about that on our blog soon.
Our current graduating intern (Berny de Vries) is researching the relationship between our 3 key areas of interest: co-creation, brand development and innovation. His assignment is to develop a client-friendly model to structure and apply our recent insights. We are very pleased to have top thinkers Frido Smulders and Erik Roskam Abbing from the University of Delft involved from the academic side of things - this is proving to be a very interesting project.
back to top ...WINNING
Last month, James was awarded the prestigious IJ-Prijs for his former work as co-founder and director of Amsterdam’s Fashion Week platform - a huge honour. The IJ-Prijs
is an annual award initiated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and given by Amsterdam’s Lord Mayor, Job Cohen to an entrepreneur who has made significant contributions to the City of Amsterdam. The ceremony was held at the brand new and beautiful Hermitage Museum and to make things even more flattering, the prize was announced with big billboards in bus shelters all over town. Over 200 designers, editors, fashion professionals, former colleagues, sponsors and City Honchos turned up to celebrate. The award came with an Eur 12.500, - cash prize, which will be spent on developing our House of Denim initiative.
back to top ...DRINKING
As noted in our previous newsletter, we are very fortunate to have such ‘tasteful’ clients. One of our recent projects for ‘Holland’s most famous brewery’ had us focusing our attention on ‘Extra Cold’ beer. Interestingly, beer served at between 0-2 degrees centigrade tastes less bitter and can be more refreshing, especially when its hot outside (...). Also, you tend to drink more of it - our research shows that this is especially true on Friday afternoons. As you can imagine it was very very hard and thirsty work doing the analysis for this project.
back to top ...STROLLING
Our mission to understand the intricate details and developments of the global ‘strollers’ (a.k.a. prams or baby buggies) market brought us to the sunny shores of California, without doubt the promised land for strolling. We soon overcame our slight annoyance at having to leave dreary, wet Amsterdam (...) and discovered some interesting cultural differences versus our client’s home market (The Netherlands). Most notable was the Californian ‘Option-Mania’: cup holders, snack trays, iPhone baskets, grocery handles,... anything that can be snapped, clicked or velcro-ed on to the stroller for extra customisation ‘bling’ was welcome. (Well... as long as the plastic was bio-degradable, naturally.).
back to top ...READING
Our desk- and bedside table favorite this season was ‘Business Model Generation
’, written by Alex Osterwalder and introduced to us by our new friend Patrick van der Pijl. Its central model is a pleasantly idiot-proof mechanism called the Business Modeling Canvas, that visualises the relationship between key assets, parts and processes of a specific business model. Rather than getting bogged down in spreadsheets and ‘hockey sticks’, it identifies opportunities for value creation or mis-match of strategic decisions. We feel this could potentially become one of the key business development tools of the decade. Recommended reading!
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