From E-Business to You-Business

The late Prof C K Prahalad, who coined the word "co-creation", envisaged the "emergence of an economy of the people, by the people, for the people" and "the democratization of industry". I believe the building block of such a democratized constitution is "You-business" - a business that is co-created using people's ideas.

If e-business is about digitizing the business processes, you-business is about opening the business processes for people's participation. Thanks to web 2.0 technologies and penetration of broadband, it is now possible for businesses to connect with people and their ideas from across the world. For instance, the winner of the first ever idea contest of the Co-Creation Lab of the BMW Group, is from India.

In the age of social media, businesses understand that they cannot create good products and good organizations - they can only co-create. Though the core mechanism of doing business or creating wealth - which is about, coming up with an idea and building an organisation around it and deliver - is always going to be the same, what businesses need for co-creation or the transformation of an e-business into you-business are 1) vision for total wealth (a vision that reflects the interests of people, planet, and everything in between) and 2) transparency.

The vision or promise of a business should be inclusive, universal and relevant for people to enlist their support. Consider the appeal of Wikipedia's vision: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment". Isn't this great vision a major enabler for it to get "more than 91,000 active contributors working on more than 16,000,000 articles in more than 270 languages"?

What's next? Now, the business has to win the confidence of people with its performance. Communications play such a singularly big role in winning the brand trust. A business needs to communicate its strengths, and sometimes, its shortcomings too, in a more transparent way. Only openness enhances brand trust. If it is a great brand that is out there in social media seeking to crowd-source ideas, people will take pride in associating with it as co-creators.

In the long run, businesses cannot make co-creation work by throwing away money. There sure could be incentives like certificates, mementos, credits, cash awards but ultimately they do not make co-creation work. If it works it is not co-creation, it would just be another type of employer-employee participation. Even within an organisation, it is not possible to make co-creation work with stick and carrot. Employees come forward to contribute to the internal Knowledge Management portal, only after they gain some trust and meaning, even where their contributions are linked to their pay and promotion!

Ultimately, it is the TOY story: The inclusive business principles (Total wealth organisation) when combined with transparency (Open corporate) form the winning formula for the transformation of an e-business into You-business. This could be a straight forward and organic way to make it big online.