Let’s face it—meeting rooms are boring. Usually bland, typically disheveled, and littered with odd remnants of past battles, today’s conference room is often where positive energy goes to die.
So we decided to redesign one of ours and rename it the Co-Creation Room, complete with wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling whiteboards. Sure, it’s just a small room but I have noticed something: it is one of the busiest conference rooms we have. It’s packed. All the time. People come together willingly – agreeing upfront to enter a crucible of co-creation – where ideas are democratized and the conversation advances past the reductive (“ok, so what do we do?”) to the expansive (“hey, what are the possibilities?”).
This theme of co-creation takes center stage when we work with customers on their broadband network projects. These projects are an incredibly diverse mix of participants, aspirations, challenges, and constraints which really brings home the necessity and power of co-creation.
Planning, funding, and designing wireline and wireless broadband networks are a question of bringing together multiple stakeholders with varied perspectives and fields of expertise, as well as negotiating complex rules of engagement, all while we plan and execute on a challenging multi-variable task. Success demands a blend of expertise, resources and political will—meaning the motivation to carry initiatives forward with enough momentum to carry through changes of leadership and priorities.
Many times prospective customers seek to start by bolstering their in-house expertise by asking for project feasibility studies Good feasibility vendors should have knowledge of multi-vendor planning, engineering design, project and vendor management, supply chain logistics, attracting funds or investment, business modeling, and ongoing network maintenance and operations, to ensure a thorough study. Look for someone with experience across many technologies and vendors, not just one.
As a Network Integrator, we bring all the pieces together. But we do more than just get the ingredients into the kitchen. Our job is to make a complete meal. By democratizing creation, we like to expand the conversation—and broker the kind of communication that gets diverse people working together productively.
The integration partner has to simultaneously understand both the customer’s big picture and the nitty-gritty details. Our priority is to minimize project risk and drive things forward effectively. Many times, we have to do the Rosetta Stone trick and broker mutual understanding among groups with different professional cultures, viewpoints, and language. We take that new shared understanding and harness it to co-create the best possible project outcome.
On a recent municipal broadband project, for example, we learned that city staff and network engineers, don’t speak the same language. A network engineer isn’t familiar with the ins and outs of water systems and a city public works director doesn’t know about provisioning network equipment.. But by building a trusted partner relationship, we helped to build the shared understanding needed. With this new shared understanding, we realized that we really had re-defined what Co-Creation really means to us.
So, when you come to Fujitsu, you will see the Co-Creation Room along with this room-sized decal:
Co-Creation: Where everyone gets to hold the pen.