Eco-System Co-Creation · a case from the co-creation research
The innovation centres were never really showcases for CGI’s own products. They were venues where a supplier convened its technology ecosystem and its customers to co-create what came next.
Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens — Future of Selling research programme
The customer’s problem
CGI — at the time still trading as Logica — served IT-buyer customers who had spent a decade investing in new technologies on the strength of vendor presentations, and had watched a meaningful share of those investments fail to deliver what the slides promised. By the early 2010s, those buyers had developed a rational defensive posture. They did not want another presentation. They wanted to see what a technology actually did before committing to it, and they wanted evidence that the party proposing it genuinely understood it.
But there was a second problem underneath the first. The buyers also could not keep up with the sheer range of emerging technologies. New platforms, frameworks, and tools were appearing faster than any internal IT function could evaluate. The customer needed not only proof that a given technology worked, but help in scanning the landscape to know which technologies were worth examining at all. That is an ecosystem problem, and it called for an ecosystem answer.
The centre as a convening venue
CGI built a network of physical SPARK centres in its offices around the world, each specialising in a set of themes, each managed by a small team. Each centre ran an innovation portfolio across three horizons — short, medium, and long term — and demonstrated the short-term innovations for which working prototypes already existed. Crucially, the technologies on show were drawn from CGI’s partners. The medium and longer-term work was done in collaboration with academic institutions and partner firms. The centre was, in effect, a curated window onto an ecosystem of innovation that CGI did not itself produce but did understand and assemble.
The thought leaders who ran the centres were evaluated not on billable days but on presentations delivered, white papers written, and workshops run. That detail matters for the eco-system reading: their job was to maintain and communicate a deep understanding of where the technology ecosystem was heading, not to sell CGI’s own services. They were curators and conveners, not product salespeople, and the firm’s choice to measure them that way is what kept the centre credible as a window onto the whole ecosystem rather than a showroom for one vendor.
The line from our research that captures the co-creation most cleanly is this one.
CGI brings the technological knowledge and the customer brings their use case knowledge in a session whereby they both search for new projects.
Future of Selling research note, CGI
Read in the eco-system frame, CGI’s technological knowledge is largely knowledge about the ecosystem — what its partners can do, which emerging technologies are real, how they might combine. The customer brings the use-case knowledge. The session is where the supplier’s ecosystem knowledge and the customer’s use knowledge meet, and out of that meeting comes a candidate project: a proof of concept that tests, on the customer’s site, whether a particular technology drawn from the ecosystem solves a particular problem the customer has.
Why this is Eco-System, not Product, Co-Creation
It would be easy to file SPARK under Product Co-Creation, because the end result is often a new application co-developed with the customer. But the defining move happens earlier and involves a third party. The technology being explored does not belong to CGI; it belongs to a partner in CGI’s ecosystem. CGI’s contribution is to know that ecosystem well enough to bring the right piece of it into the room, and to convene the conversation in which the customer’s problem and the partner’s technology can be matched. Remove the ecosystem of technology partners and there is nothing to demonstrate in the centre. The third party is structural, exactly as it is in the Actemium case.
The SPARK centres and the Actemium model are, in this sense, two versions of the same form. Actemium brings start-ups into the room one at a time, through direct introductions. CGI brings a curated, themed, always-on display of the ecosystem’s technologies into a physical venue. The mechanism differs; the logic is identical. In both, the supplier’s role is to convene parties from the ecosystem so that co-creation with the customer becomes possible.
What the case teaches about Eco-System Co-Creation
The first lesson is that the venue can be an institution, not just an introduction. Actemium convenes the ecosystem through ad hoc meetings; CGI institutionalised the convening into a permanent, funded facility with dedicated staff and a curated portfolio. Eco-System Co-Creation can be done lightly, deal by deal, or it can be built into the firm as standing infrastructure. The heavier version costs more and reaches further, but both are recognisably the same form.
The second lesson is that the supplier must be credible across the ecosystem, not just expert in its own products. The SPARK thought leaders earned their standing through white papers and workshops about emerging technology in general — not about CGI’s offerings in particular. That breadth of credibility is what made customers willing to treat the centre as a trustworthy guide to the ecosystem. A supplier seen as promoting only its own products cannot convene an ecosystem, because no one believes the curation is honest.
The third lesson is that funding follows form. CGI ran the SPARK centres as cost centres, not as sales channels with revenue targets. That choice is what allowed the centres to be genuine convening venues rather than disguised showrooms. The moment an ecosystem-convening function is asked to hit quarterly revenue, the curation bends toward whatever sells this quarter, the customer notices, and the convening loses its credibility. Eco-System Co-Creation, when it is institutionalised, has to be funded as the strategic infrastructure it is.
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), drawing on interviews with Sander Van den Born at CGI. It illustrates Eco-System Co-Creation — the form of co-creation in which a supplier convenes parties from its wider ecosystem so that it and the customer can co-create new applications. A companion Eco-System Co-Creation case is Actemium’s start-up brokering. To follow the research, visit futureofselling.eu.
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