Make Meaning

Beethoven once said “What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose.” As a first time entrepreneur, there are things I’d like to share with the world to share my experience. The purpose of this blog is to help me internalize new knowledge and principles and share it with the rest of the world to provoke conversations and feedback. From this journey, I hope to improve my communication skills (especially since English is my second language. J) and learn know insights from readers. This blog will touch upon various subjects. Things I learn from my entrepreneurial endeavors, books I read, interactions I have with people, and things I just think about.

I decided to go down the entrepreneurial path at an early stage of my life. Perhaps it’s because I discovered what truly drives me each and every day: making an impactful real difference is helluva fun thing to do.

From this career, I'm learning a lot, meeting new people, and understanding people around me better than I did before. I became passionate about learning new knowledge to see the world with different perspectives and established the willingness to change my behavioral habits to become a better person.

Co-Creation

Today I’m going to talk about what I learned from the book “The Power of Co-Creation” by Venkat Ramaswamy.

As my first venture, one of the many I anticipate to come in my career, I decided to set foot on baby clothes. An industry I had absolutely no knowledge or interest of knowing before. But with a lot of support and encouragement from friends and personal excitement to do something that has never been done before, I decided to take on full force and try to win it. To become more knowledgeable about parents than parents themselves.

In order to accomplish this, I realized I need various channels of information flow that will provide me with parenting. This led me to realize the value of engaging with customers for communication and interaction is essential for lowering risks and costs for Bebarang and increasing individuals' value.

In the past, when enterprises emphasize customer engagement, they neglected to pay attention on HOW they engaged with people. As a result, it was largely passive in the process of value creation. Individuals do not get to decide what they are to share with the enterprise, but instead answer the questions asked of them at the focus group – a one-way push communication.

In order to become truly a co-creative enterprise, Ramaswamy argues organizations need to use the experience of individuals as the starting point, rather than its own products and services. If an organization desires to draw innovative ideas from customers or employees, developing compelling experiences with individuals is essential.

Ramaswamy points out co-creation is a paradigm of value creation. It is about meaningful engagement of individuals, personally and collectively, through engagement platforms enabled by transparency, access, dialogue, and reflexivity, to mutually expand value, while enhancing risk-reward relationships and fostering transformational change.

There are numerous ways the enterprise can design the platform for customer engagement.

• Designing of new offerings (Nike+ service/application for runners)
• Involving customer in the design (NikeID)
• Marketing process (Doritos Superbowl Commercial)
• Ideating with customers (MyStarbucksIdea – Customers actually giving inputs to new product mix, services, etc)

At Bebarang, we are focused on achieving the following three things to be a co-creative enterprise

• Learn how to create meaningful and rewarding experience for parents using Bebarang
• Co-creation to be both the means and the end, in a continuous cycle
• Engage individuals as active co-creators in defining and delivering value

These efforts are currently being translated into creating a better website that listens to customer's voice, fostering social communities that benefit our customers' online experience, and shaping a better service overall for parents.

Now here’s a little exercise I’d like to share with all my facebook friends regarding co-creation.

What are some ways you can think of for Bebarang to be more co-creative in engaging with parents? Anything from Facebook fan page engagement to Bebarang community forum, we are all open for suggestions. I would love to hear what you have to say! If we like the suggestion, we will actually incorporate it in our business value creation process!

You can email me at allen@bebarang.com, message me, leave a wall post, call me @ 734-972-6601, or want to talk to me in person to share your thoughts – I’ll cover the tab. ;)