Co-creation and stakeholder engagement (corporate communicatie)

New technologies and social media are challenging the traditional role of the Chief Communications Officer (CCO). This represents a paradigm shift from controlling the corporate brand message to only being capable of influencing the targets. This shift also demands brands to listen more to what is happening in online communities and social media and to generate higher levels of engagement with their audiences.

Additionally, customers are growingly becoming activists, new brands with value propositions built around ethics and sustainability are challenging the established players, and ESG investment is exponentially growing. This is forcing the CCO to become the Chief Conscience Officer of the organisation, who needs to be capable of deeply understanding the expectations of the different brand stakeholders.

In parallel, the cycles of innovation are speeding up and many industries are being and will be disrupted. This demands deeply understanding what the key trends and megatrends that will shape the future of industries and society are. This also demands the CCO to become the Chief Connecting Officer, the person who needs to connect the organisation, its leadership team and the business strategy with the outside environment.

This is why organisations need to adopt more open and collaborative approaches to business and innovation. This is a very strategic course that aims to focus on how brands can open up to the exterior to better understand the key trends in the context, understand the demands and expectations of their stakeholders and deeply engage them in strategic partnerships to develop new business models, strategies, innovations and communication platforms.

• To understand why collaborative innovation and more specifically co-creation have emerged. To demarcate co-creation from some other collaborative innovation methods such as crowdsourcing and open innovation.

• To comprehend what the key different innovation typologies are (category creation, renovation, and line extensions), how to combine them to build a balanced portfolio of innovations, and what their relationship is with the different collaborative innovation methods.

• Participants learn what the three-wave strategy is and why it is the key for sustained profitable growth in any organisation.

• We discuss how the three-wave strategy demands that organisations understand the key trends and megatrends that will shape the future of business and society. The new role of the CCO as the Chief Connecting Officer is introduced.

• To understand how the CCO needs to also become the Chief Conscience Officer. This is about deeply understanding the key expectations that the stakeholders of the organisations have.

• The course also discusses what the benefits of adopting a co-creative perspective to management are, the stages of a co-creation project and the key success factors for each one of them.

• Brands and organisations can approach co-creation from either a tactical or a strategical perspective. The latter is of course the most interesting. However, we need to understand what the key barriers to develop a strategic approach to co-creation are and how to overcome them.
• We discuss how the Chief Communications Officer can use co-creation to better connect the organisation with the outside and to fully understand the expectations from its different stakeholders to build together with them—with a truly collaborative approach—better business models, strategies, innovations and communication platforms.