Experience Co-Creation · a case from the co-creation research
When a manufacturer charges for the outcome rather than the engine, supplier and customer become locked into co-creating a great experience — because only a great experience keeps the meter running.
Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens — Future of Selling research programme
What the customer pays for
An airline operating a Rolls-Royce engine does not, in the conventional sense, own it. The engine sits on the wing, the airline flies the aircraft, and the maintenance is handled in the background by the manufacturer. What the airline pays for is hours — hours of thrust, available when the aircraft is ready to depart, billed by the operating hour of the engine. The engine’s acquisition cost, its overhaul schedule, its unscheduled removals, and its lifetime maintenance sit on Rolls-Royce’s side, not the airline’s. The airline buys the outcome the engine produces, not the engine.
This single change — charging for the outcome rather than the asset — transforms the relationship into a continuous act of co-creation. Under a conventional engine sale, the supplier’s interest in the customer’s experience largely ends once the engine is delivered and paid for. Under Power by the Hour, the supplier is paid only while the engine is flying well. A grounded engine earns nothing. An unreliable engine earns nothing and costs the manufacturer money. The supplier’s revenue is now tied, hour by hour, to the quality of the customer’s experience with the product.
These customers are no longer buying a product but a service, which is delivered by the product.
From Selling to Co-Creating, on the Rolls-Royce case
Co-creating the experience
Because the meter only runs when the engine runs well, Rolls-Royce and the airline are pulled into co-creating the engine’s performance together. The manufacturer instruments each engine with sensors that stream operational data continuously to its engineering operations centre, so it can see how each individual engine is performing across different routes, conditions, and pilot techniques. That data was originally built to let the manufacturer carry the contractual risk responsibly. But it quickly became the basis for a shared effort to make the engine perform better.
On the strength of that data, Rolls-Royce advises the airline on how to operate the engines for better fuel efficiency and longer life, even offering to help train pilots to fly in ways that reduce engine stress. The airline shares its operational realities; the manufacturer shares what the data reveals. Together they improve the experience — fewer disruptions, lower fuel burn, longer engine life. This is genuinely co-created: the manufacturer cannot optimise the engine without the airline’s cooperation in how it is flown, and the airline cannot extract the engine’s full value without the manufacturer’s insight into how it is performing. Both are working continuously on the same outcome.
The customer success manager is the same idea
This is where the case reaches well beyond aerospace. The customer success manager — now a fixture in software and subscription businesses — exists for exactly the reason Power by the Hour exists. When a customer pays per month or per use rather than buying a product outright, the supplier is only paid as long as the customer keeps succeeding with the product. A subscription customer who has a poor experience simply stops paying. So the supplier appoints someone whose entire job is to co-create a good ongoing experience with the customer: onboarding them, helping them use the product well, watching the usage data for signs of trouble, intervening before the customer disengages.
The customer success manager and the Rolls-Royce engineering operations centre are doing the same work. Both monitor how the customer is actually experiencing the product. Both intervene to improve that experience. Both exist because the supplier’s revenue now depends on the customer’s continued successful use, not on a one-time sale. Experience Co-Creation is the form that connects an aircraft engine billed by the hour to a software subscription billed by the month. The product could not be more different; the co-creation logic is identical.
The honest qualifier
Experience Co-Creation changes the supplier’s business model, not just its sales process, and the change is demanding. When the supplier charges for the outcome, it takes the asset, the maintenance, the operating risk, and the financial complexity onto its own books. The early years of a Power by the Hour contract are typically loss-making by design, with the manufacturer recovering its investment over the long life of the agreement. Managing the cash flow and the accounting of a contract that runs for decades is a serious corporate-finance undertaking, not an extension of a sales playbook. A supplier that promises to be paid only for outcomes, without the balance sheet and the operational capability to deliver and measure those outcomes, is promising something it cannot sustain.
The same caution applies to the subscription business and its customer success function. Charging for ongoing success means the supplier carries the cost of ensuring that success, continuously, for the life of the relationship. That cost is real and it is permanent. Experience Co-Creation is powerful precisely because it aligns the supplier’s fortunes with the customer’s, but the alignment cuts both ways: the supplier prospers only if it can actually keep co-creating a good experience, indefinitely.
What the case teaches about Experience Co-Creation
The first lesson is that the pricing model creates the co-creation. The moment a supplier charges for the outcome rather than the product, it has bound its own revenue to the quality of the customer’s ongoing experience — and co-creation of that experience stops being optional. Rolls-Royce monitors and improves engine performance not out of goodwill but because its revenue depends on it. The right pricing model makes the supplier want to co-create the experience.
The second lesson is that Experience Co-Creation requires the supplier to see the experience in real time. Rolls-Royce instruments its engines; the software supplier watches its usage data; both need a live view of how the customer is actually doing, because they cannot improve an experience they cannot see. A supplier that wants to charge for outcomes must first build the capability to observe those outcomes as they happen. Without it, the co-creation has nothing to work on.
The third lesson is that this form aligns supplier and customer more tightly than any other. In Product, Eco-System, and Strategic Co-Creation, the supplier’s interest in the customer is strong but bounded. In Experience Co-Creation, the supplier literally cannot prosper unless the customer keeps succeeding with the product, day after day. That is the tightest alignment of interests in the whole co-creation family — and it is why, done well, with the right business model behind it, it produces the most durable supplier-customer relationships of all.
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 documented in From Selling to Co-Creating (Lemmens, Donaldson and Marcos, 2014). The detailed Rolls-Royce Civil Aerospace case study was developed by Dr. Javier Marcos and Prof. Lynette Ryals at Cranfield School of Management (2011), drawing on interviews with Colin England and Andy Lane at Rolls-Royce. It illustrates Experience Co-Creation — the form of co-creation in which a supplier charges for the outcome rather than the product, requiring supplier and customer to co-create a continuously excellent experience. The same logic underpins the modern customer success manager. To follow the research, visit futureofselling.eu.
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