Co-Creating Value With Customers Here's an excerpt of the book, "The Future Of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers". Haven't read the book, but I probably would have noticed it earlier had the title been "Co-Creating Value with Customers" and not "The Future of Competition". It jibes with my customer-centric marketing views. An intriguing concept is presented: the book asserts that the experience of co-creating value itself is part of the value. And the book also validates my firm conviction that leveraging networks and 'platform plays' (that's technology industry jargon, it'd be another post to explain it but essentially it leverages a network too). The emerging reality forces us to reexamine the traditional system of company-centric value creation that has served us so well over the past 100 years. We now need a new frame of reference for value creation. The answer, we believe, lies in a different premise centered on cocreation of value. It begins with the changing role of the consumer in the industrial system. ...And don't mistake self-service for customer involvement. Cocreation, the authors maintain, is not the transfer or outsourcing of activities to customers or a marginal customization of products and services. It isn't scripting or staging of customer events around the company's offerings. Those kinds of company-customer interactions no longer satisfy most consumers today. It's the cocreation experience (not the offering) that is the basis of value for each individual.