Eco-System Co-Creation · a case from the co-creation research
How a systems integrator turned itself into a broker between start-ups and its own customers — and discovered a form of co-creation that depends on bringing in a third party.
Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens — Future of Selling research programme
The integrator’s problem
Actemium is an industrial systems integrator. Its customers are industrial companies with operations to run, improve, and modernise. The integrator’s traditional role is to bring proven technologies together into working systems for those customers. That role has a built-in limitation: an integrator works with the technologies it already knows. When the most interesting opportunity for a customer involves an emerging technology the integrator has not yet worked with — often something coming out of a start-up the customer has never heard of — the traditional integrator model has no natural way to surface it.
The customer has the same problem from the other side. An industrial company knows its own operations intimately but has no efficient way to scan the start-up landscape for technologies that might advance those operations. There are too many start-ups, most are not relevant, and the cost of evaluating them one by one is prohibitive. The customer needs a filter. The start-up, meanwhile, has a technology but no access to the industrial customers who might use it, and no credibility with them even if it could reach them.
The brokering model
Actemium built a model that connects all three. The mechanism is simple to describe and revealing in what it implies about co-creation.
Actemium invites start-ups to pitch their products and services to their salespeople in order to screen which could be interesting for their customers.
Future of Selling research note, Actemium
The first step is a screening. Start-ups pitch to Actemium’s salespeople, who assess which technologies could be genuinely interesting for the customers they know well. The salespeople are acting as a filter here, using their deep knowledge of their customers’ operations to judge relevance — something neither the start-up nor a generic scout could do as well. The second step is the introduction. When a salesperson sees a plausible fit, they invite the start-up into a meeting with the relevant customer. The third step is the joint exploration: in that meeting, Actemium, the customer, and the start-up together work out whether there is a real opportunity to develop a joint project that would advance the customer.
Notice what Actemium has become. It is no longer only an integrator of technologies. It is a broker of relationships within an ecosystem — the party that holds the customer relationships, holds enough understanding of the start-up landscape to filter it, and convenes the three-way conversation in which a new project might be co-created. The value Actemium adds is not a technology it owns. It is the curated introduction and the trusted room.
Why the third party is the point
The defining feature of Eco-System Co-Creation is that the solution requires a party who is neither the supplier nor the customer. In the Actemium case, the start-up holds the technology, the customer holds the operational problem and context, and Actemium holds the relationships and the judgement about fit. Remove any of the three and the co-creation collapses. Without the start-up, there is no new technology. Without the customer, there is no problem to solve and no production environment to test in. Without Actemium, the start-up and the customer never find each other, and would not trust each other if they did.
This is what distinguishes Eco-System Co-Creation from Product Co-Creation. In Product Co-Creation, the supplier and customer have, between them, everything they need; the co-creation is a closed loop between two parties. In Eco-System Co-Creation, the supplier and customer recognise that they do not have everything they need, and the act of co-creation begins with deliberately bringing in the party who has the missing piece. The supplier’s willingness to introduce a third party — even a third party it does not control — is the move that defines the form.
What the case teaches about Eco-System Co-Creation
The first lesson is that the supplier’s most valuable asset in this form is its relationships, not its products. Actemium can broker start-ups to customers because it holds trusted customer relationships and credible technical judgement. A supplier whose only asset is its own product range cannot play this role, because it has nothing to convene around. Eco-System Co-Creation rewards suppliers who have built breadth of relationship and depth of customer understanding, and it is largely closed to suppliers who have built only a catalogue.
The second lesson is that brokering requires the supplier to give up being the centre of the solution. When Actemium introduces a start-up to a customer, it is accepting that the eventual solution may be built largely from the start-up’s technology, not Actemium’s own. A supplier unwilling to make that concession — insisting that every solution must be built from its own products — cannot do Eco-System Co-Creation, because it cannot bring in the parties who hold the missing pieces. The willingness to be the convener rather than the source is the price of admission to this form, and it is a price many suppliers are reluctant to pay.
The third lesson is that the filter is the value. There is no shortage of start-ups, and no shortage of industrial companies that would, in principle, like to know about relevant new technologies. What is scarce is the trusted party who can tell a specific customer which specific start-up is worth a meeting. Actemium’s screening of start-ups against its real knowledge of its customers’ operations is the irreplaceable contribution. In Eco-System Co-Creation, the supplier earns its place not by having the technology but by knowing, better than anyone else in the ecosystem, which combinations are worth bringing together.
About this case. This case is documented in the Future of Selling research programme led by Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens (Solvay Brussels School / AMS Antwerp Management School) and Prof. dr. Javier Marcos (Cranfield School of Management). Actemium, an industrial systems integrator, screens start-ups through its salespeople and introduces promising ones to its customers to co-create new project ideas. It illustrates Eco-System Co-Creation — the form of co-creation in which supplier and customer deliberately bring other parties from their ecosystem into the room. A companion Eco-System Co-Creation case is CGI’s SPARK innovation centres. To follow the research, visit futureofselling.eu.
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