Product Co-Creation · a case from the co-creation research
A second Bekaert case: how co-developing a new reinforcement method with the people who pour the concrete turned a century-old building practice into a jointly owned innovation.
Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens — Future of Selling research programme
The product and the problem
Bekaert manufactures a steel-fibre concrete reinforcement product called Dramix. It replaces the conventional steel mesh that contractors have used for more than a century to reinforce concrete in floors, tunnels, and industrial slabs. Instead of laying a grid of steel bars before the concrete is poured, the builder mixes fine steel fibres directly into the concrete itself. The fibres distribute through the mix and reinforce the structure from within. The result is faster to install, more uniform in performance, and less prone to cracking over the structure’s life.
On paper, this is a better product. In practice, a better product is not enough, because the people who have to use it have spent their entire careers reinforcing concrete the old way. A contractor who has poured mesh-reinforced concrete for thirty years has deep, hard-won knowledge about how it behaves — and no knowledge at all about how fibre-reinforced concrete behaves on their particular sites, with their particular crews, under their particular conditions. The product cannot simply be handed over. It has to be developed into the customer’s practice.
Co-developing the application
This is where the co-creation happens. Bekaert does not sell Dramix as a finished product to be dropped into an unchanged construction process. The firm works upstream with architects and engineering firms to design the reinforcement into the structure from the start — calculating fibre dosages for specific structural loads, adapting the concrete mix, and proving the performance against the conventional method through joint testing. The engineering knowledge of how much fibre a given structure needs, in a given mix, for a given load, is developed together: Bekaert brings the material science, the engineering firm brings the structural requirements and the site reality.
The product that results is not really the steel fibre on its own. It is the steel fibre plus the dosage, plus the mix design, plus the structural calculation, plus the proof that it performs — and all of those are co-created with the customer for the specific project. Each project teaches Bekaert something about how the product performs in a new context, and that learning feeds the next project. The supplier’s product range deepens with every co-creation, exactly as it did in the carding case.
The honest qualifier
It is worth being candid about how this case differs from the carding one. In the carding case, the customer’s production line generated genuine product surprises — the thinner fibres, the dust reduction — that neither party predicted. The Dramix case is a milder form of Product Co-Creation. The product itself is largely developed by Bekaert; what is co-created is the application of the product to each customer’s structure and practice. That is still co-creation — neither party can specify the working solution alone — but it sits closer to joint application development than to joint product invention.
We include it deliberately, because most Product Co-Creation in industrial markets looks more like Dramix than like the carding breakthrough. The dramatic case, where the customer’s environment throws up an unexpected product benefit, is rare and memorable. The everyday case, where supplier and customer jointly develop how a new product actually works in the customer’s specific context, is common and undervalued. Both are Product Co-Creation. A supplier who only recognises the dramatic version will miss most of the opportunities the everyday version offers.
What the case teaches about Product Co-Creation
The Dramix case sharpens two lessons. The first is that the unit of co-creation is often the application, not the product. A supplier with a technically superior product still has to co-develop how that product works inside the customer’s process, because the customer holds knowledge about that process the supplier does not have. The contractor knows things about pouring concrete on a real site that no material scientist in a laboratory can fully anticipate.
The second is that Product Co-Creation changes who has to be in the room. Selling mesh is a transaction with a buyer. Co-creating a fibre-reinforced structure requires the architect, the structural engineer, and the contractor — the people who specify, calculate, and pour. Product Co-Creation pulls the supplier into a wider set of the customer’s stakeholders than a product sale ever would, because developing the application requires the knowledge those stakeholders hold. That widening is not a complication to be managed. It is the mechanism by which the co-creation works.
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 the second of two Bekaert cases illustrating Product Co-Creation, the form of co-creation in which supplier and customer develop a new product — or a new application of a product — together. The companion Bekaert case concerns the carding spike in the textile industry. To follow the research, visit futureofselling.eu.
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