B2B firms in the research

Over sixteen years the research programme has documented dozens of cases. A selection is written up here. More will be added as cases are progressively prepared for publication; some are documented in greater depth in the book From Selling to Co-Creating, the HBR article Entrepreneurial Selling, or the working paper From Value Selling to Value Engineering.

Cases from the co-creation wave · 2009–2018

Salomon FoodWorld

Food & hospitality · experience co-creation

Salomon began as a meat producer supplying hamburgers and similar products to restaurants and wholesalers. The strategic question they faced was familiar to many mid-market B2B suppliers: how to escape commodity competition. Their answer was to stop selling meat and start selling guest experience.

They developed a service in which they survey their restaurant customers’ diners on a regular basis, then use the findings to help the restaurant develop menus and dishes that appeal to specific emotional drivers. The framework they built — the “Culinary Code” — is grounded in neuromarketing research, mapping food presentations, ingredients, and menu descriptions to emotional categories such as adventure, control, and enjoyment. Salomon then redesigns parts of the restaurant’s menu around the survey results, often co-developing new products with the restaurant when nothing in the existing range fits.

The case is significant for the research in three ways. First, it illustrates experience co-creation in its strongest form: the supplier participates in the customer’s delivery to their customers, not just in the supply of inputs. Second, it shows how a commodity product company can move upstream into strategic and experiential value by adding research and design services around its products. Third, it has driven product innovation Salomon would not have arrived at alone — they have expanded into mozzarella sticks and other adjacent products that emerged from restaurant menu redesigns. This is co-creation as a route to innovation, exactly as the first wave of the research described it.

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SAP and Barco

Enterprise technology · product co-creation

In 2011, SAP and Barco co-developed the control room of the future, built on the then-new SAP HANA in-memory database. SAP brought the technology platform; Barco brought visualisation expertise and use cases from operational environments where their products were deployed. Neither party could have built the product alone — the case became one of the clearest illustrations in the research of how product co-creation works when the underlying technology is new enough that the customer use cases are still being discovered.

Detailed case study to be developed.

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CGI

IT services · product co-creation

CGI built inspiration centres where customers come to discover new uses for emerging technology. CGI brings the technological knowledge; the customer brings their use-case knowledge of the industry they operate in. The product or service that emerges is built jointly, often unlocking innovations neither side would have arrived at on their own. The model has since been extended across multiple sectors.

Detailed case study to be developed.

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Actemium

Industrial automation · ecosystem co-creation

Actemium uses an ecosystem of startups to co-create new project ideas with their customers. Where a traditional supplier would propose what they could deliver from their existing capabilities, Actemium assembles capabilities from across an external network to match what the customer actually needs. The case extended the co-creation framing from a two-party model (supplier and customer) to a multi-party one.

Detailed case study to be developed.

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Callebaut, Bekaert, and others from the first wave

Documented in the book and HBR article

Callebaut (strategic co-creation with chocolatiers), Bekaert (product co-creation with industrial customers), and several other cases were documented as part of the first wave. Each appears in the book From Selling to Co-Creating or in the HBR article Entrepreneurial Selling, with fuller detail than is reproduced here.

Web-friendly case write-ups to be developed.

Cases from the value engineering wave · 2022–present

Kaneka Belgium

Industrial chemistry · multi-dimensional value · risk integration

Kaneka Belgium sits in the middle of one of the most consequential industrial supply chains in Europe. Their plants in Westerlo produce polymers used in sealants, PVC additives, and the expanded polypropylene beads that go into bicycle helmets, car bumpers, and Starbucks straws. Their customers are firms like Henkel, 3M, Soudal, and the tier-one automotive suppliers. Their suppliers are BASF, INEOS, LyondellBasell, Shell, and Arkema.

A three-hour interview with their senior procurement and supply chain leader, conducted in May 2026, reveals how an industrial supply chain under multi-dimensional pressure reorganises itself around trust, intelligence, judgement, and integration. The case is significant because it shows the value engineering framework operating in conditions of acute uncertainty — not as a theoretical framework but as the operating system of a real B2B firm. It also illustrates the central insight that risk management has stopped being a compliance discipline and become the day-to-day work of supply chain leadership.

Read the field note →

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ING Belgium

Banking · selling sustainability

A 2023 collaboration between ING and Solvay Business School on how to sell sustainability when the customer’s willingness to pay for it is uncertain. The work was a catalyst for restarting the broader research programme. ING in the Netherlands had also been one of the original triggers of the first wave of the research in 2009, asking how to sell during the financial crisis — a symmetry that became visible only in retrospect.

Detailed case study to be developed.

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Circl

Modular construction · layered business case

A Belgian modular construction company building circular, bioregional housing. The case has been used to illustrate how the Layered Business Case works in practice when the value being argued spans financial, regulatory, environmental, and community dimensions simultaneously. The customer-side coalition includes investors, regulators, local authorities, and end residents — each weighting a different layer of the case.

Detailed case study to be developed.

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AZ Delta

Healthcare · partnership selling

A Belgian hospital that has worked with several B2B suppliers in a partnership mode that defies the typical transactional pattern of hospital procurement. The case has been used to map a customer journey in which the supplier and the customer share commitment to a multi-year outcome, and to illustrate what defaults the partnership to a transactional service-delivery model when key trust-building steps are rushed or skipped.

Detailed case study to be developed.