Reframing, reconfiguration and the road to co-production
Reframing, reconfiguration and the road to co-production

Reframing, reconfiguration and the road to co-production

Richard Normann wrote a landmark book in the 90’s called Reframing Business. It had a profound impact on my thinking about business and on others like C.K. Prahalad that seems to be an avid follower of his philosophies. Much of his work is based on social sciences where the power of the individual and the emergence of the “collective” showed us that a new management science needs to be the focus of the future. Recurrent purposeful emergence, higher and lower systemic logic, pro-active ecogenesis, strategic paradigms, etc are some of the terms that Normann introduced to the world. Anyone with an imagination for business would be fascinated by the creative writing style and clarity of description.

Check this title of a book to be published in May this year: “The New Age of Innovation: Mobilizing Global Networks to Unlock Co-Created Value in Your Company”. Looking at the initial content, it will become a must-read for those interested in Normann and Raminez’s work. Co-design, co-creation, co-production, crowdsourcing, social networks, virtualized, have all become signs of the era we’re living in.

There are two major phenomena merging in this era; customerization and co-production. Customerization drives a strategy towards providing individualised marketing messages that are customised for the individual. And, drives production strategies towards ensuring that variances in product/service are catered for by the existing infrastructure. Hence the capability that an organization needs is the ability to continuously separate the commonalities from the variabilities (in both product/service and production).

C.K. Prahalad’s previous book on the Future of Competition presents a great collection of co-production related examples and models. He also focuses on the experience economy and the future role customers will play.