Product Co-Creation · a case from the co-creation research
How a dormant patent and a customer willing to risk a production line became a case of co-developing a product neither party could have designed alone.
Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens — Future of Selling research programme
The setting
Bekaert is a global leader in metallic wire-based materials. The case sits in a small corner of the business: the textile industry. In a textile carding line, raw fibre is passed through cylinders wrapped in fine metallic spikes. The spikes break the fibre bundle apart and align the strands into something the weaving machine can handle. The carding cylinder is the bottleneck of the entire line, which runs continuously and stops only for maintenance. The wire and spikes that wrap the cylinder are a tiny fraction of the capital cost of the machine, but they govern almost everything that matters about how it runs: throughput, product quality, dust generation, downtime.
At some point in the late 2000s, Bekaert acquired a company that held — without anyone immediately realising it — a university licence on a new geometric design for the spikes. The design was unproven, more complex to manufacture, and entirely theoretical. To turn the licence into a product, Bekaert needed a textile manufacturer who would let them test the new spike on a real production line. This is not a small ask. A carding line is one of the customer’s most valuable assets, and the test was, by definition, a test. No one could promise it would not damage throughput, quality, or worse.
Why the customer agreed
The sales force found a customer who agreed. The reason the customer agreed was not the technology and not the patent. It was that Bekaert’s sales executive on the account had, over years, built a relationship deep enough that the customer was willing to take the operational risk of letting them try. The Bekaert people described their way of working in a single sentence that has stayed with us ever since.
Our sales people practically live at the customer in order to ensure the process runs fine.
Bekaert interview, From Selling to Co-Creating
That sentence is the precondition for Product Co-Creation. The supplier was not arriving periodically with an offer; the supplier was embedded in the customer’s daily operating reality. The sales executive at the carding customer was, in practice, an extension of the customer’s own production team. The patent was the trigger. The relationship was what made the trigger usable. Without the relationship, there would have been no production line to test on, and the patent would have stayed dormant in the acquired company’s files.
The co-creation itself
The test ran on the customer’s line. Throughput went up by twenty per cent. The new geometry produced less dust, which lowered maintenance costs. And because the fibres held more precisely, they could be made thinner — a material saving the customer had not even asked for and that Bekaert’s engineers had not predicted. This is the signature of genuine co-creation: the customer found benefits the supplier did not know to look for. The customer found the second-order benefits; Bekaert found the first-order one. Neither party, working alone, would have arrived at the full result.
On the back of that first test, Bekaert co-developed further spike geometries for other end-use applications, working with other customers in the same embedded way. A patent that had sat dormant became a product line. The supplier brought the metallurgy and the licence; each customer brought a production environment and the use knowledge that turned a theoretical geometry into a proven application. The product range that resulted was, in the truest sense, co-created.
What the case teaches about Product Co-Creation
Three lessons stand out. The first is that the relationship comes before the product. Product Co-Creation is only possible where the supplier has earned enough trust to be allowed into the customer’s most sensitive operating environment. The carding test was possible because the relationship was already there; no supplier arriving cold with a new spike geometry could have replicated it.
The second is that the customer routinely finds value the supplier cannot see. The dust reduction and the thinner fibres came from the customer’s side of the partnership. A product designed entirely on the supplier’s side would have under-described the value that actually emerged in use. In Product Co-Creation, the test is not the validation of the product; it is the source of the product.
The third is that a single co-creation success becomes a repeatable capability. Once Bekaert had co-developed one geometry on one customer’s line, the firm had both a proven product and a proven method for developing the next one. The capability to co-create products with customers turned out to be more durable than any individual product that came out of it. That is the prize in Product Co-Creation: not the one new product, but the capability to keep developing new ones with the people who will use them.
About this case. This case is drawn from 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), and was first documented in From Selling to Co-Creating (Lemmens, Donaldson and Marcos, 2014). It is one of several cases illustrating Product Co-Creation, the form of co-creation in which supplier and customer develop a new product together. Companion Product Co-Creation cases include a second Bekaert example (Dramix concrete reinforcement) and the SAP and Barco control-room collaboration. To follow the research, visit futureofselling.eu.
Future Of Selling 
Leave a comment