The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers

In this visionary book, C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy explore why, despite unbounded opportunities for innovation, companies still can't satisfy customers and sustain profitable growth. The explanation for this apparent paradox lies in recognizing the structural changes brought about by the convergence of industries and technologies; ubiquitous connectivity and globalization; and, as a consequence, the evolving role of the consumer from passive recipient to active co-creator of value. Managers need a new framework for value creation. This book is about the emerging "next practices" in value creation.

Increasingly, individual customers interact with a network of firms and consumer communities to co-create value. No longer can firms autonomously create value. Neither is value embedded in products and services per se. Products are but an artifact around which compelling individual experiences are created. As a result, the focus of innovation will shift from products and services to experience environments that individuals can interact with to co-construct their own experiences. These personalized co-creation experiences are the source of unique value for consumers and companies alike.

In this emerging opportunity space, companies must build new strategic capital-a new theory on how to compete. This book presents a detailed view of the new functional, organizational, infrastructure, and governance capabilities that will be required for competing on experiences and co-creating unique value. This is the future of competition.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Future of marketing..., 2006-06-19
Caveat - I see most things from a marketer's prospective, hence, I read this book in that context. I think the ideas of Prahalad and Ramaswamy are the future of marketing. If you take a look at a few of today's successful companies, including Amazon.com and eBay for instance, you will see that one of the reasons they have been so successful is because they worked with their customers. I think the book should be required reading for anyone going into the marketing field.


9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

Nothing insightful that is worth the onerous read, 2005-06-22
The authors have created a massive text that does not add much to the earlier paper they had published. The book has mainly two messages - maximizing customer experience is the basis of value creation and firms have to be experience-driven rather than product-centric. (BTW, these are the author's buzz words not mine ).

They cite cases that have no hard links to their messages but a tenous connection. There is no proof or metrics to show that this is the way to go.

I am sure the academics have the luxury of writing long books to sustain their tenureship compared to us real-world practioners, where things have to work now or in the next quarter for us to go anywhere in the corporate world. Sorry, academics.


5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

Breakthrough Thinking for higher IQ managers, 2005-04-23
The concepts presented in the book are deceptively easy to gloss over. I do not blame the reviewers at this site who did not 'get it'.

This is not something one can expect to read and understand over a coast-to-coast flight like most of the popular business books one tends to find at the airport book stores.

It is heavily intellectual content and for those who do 'get it', the payoffs can be huge, as have been documented by the real-life examples presented in the book. There are no quick fixes here and no 'if you have problem A, do X' type remedies, nor the 'company A did X and it worked for them' type anecdotal evidence.

Real-life examples have been used to demonstrate the backbone of the theory. This is necessary because there is no evidence of the concept of co-creation present yet in the collective *consciousness* of the managers today (it does happen accidentally, though).

Now you must be wondering how I can be so emphatic about stating my opinion. Well, I have had the fantastic opportunity to do some work on this subject during my MBA program through the B-school class offered by one of the authors at Ross Business School, as well as the opportunity of doing independent research on the subject matter of this book.

I can assure the prospective reader that the material requires serious mental exercise, and the theory and frameworks are not easy to grasp or implement. The reason for this is that the implementation of the concepts being presented requires some serious inside-out redesign of the organization, processes, systems as well as value appropriation contracts..

However, for those interested in finding out about which direction to look to innovate, especially the entrepreneurial types, this is an excellent opportunity to learn something new and apply it to the extent your own organizational processes, systems and capabilities will allow, or create ground-up organizations, processes, systems and capabilities to take advantage of the opportunities to the fullest.

Sunil Chhaya, Ph.D.


15 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

Disappointing, 2004-08-01
C.K. Prahalad must be getting a bit long in the tooth. Or perhaps he has had difficulty in recent years finding a co-author as talented as Gary Hamel. Whatever his excuse, his latest book is a disappointing throwback to specious management bestsellers of the 80s and 90s. Prahalad's book is long on clichés and short on insight. The central thesis of the book is a rehash of Kotler's better articulted work on the prosumer. Given all of their emphasis on "value co-creation" the book seems woefully short on profitability and ROI numbers. I couldn't find any case studies that showed the value in value co-creation. At the same time, truly innovative and competitive "value co-creation" businesses - Linux, Apache and the whole open source software movement which Microsoft now finds so threatening - are barely mentioned. Are we just to take the authors' word for it that companies adopting a "C-type" structure are automatically profitable? Hmm. Maybe it depends on whether these firms adopt "X,Y, or Z-type" management. Can lucrative consulting gigs be far behind?


3 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

must read for 21st century human, 2004-07-15
Alvin Toffler has indicated customization is future trend. He is(was) right.

The future of competition shows what, why, and how ( sometimes, who) about the future of product and service. What a corporation must do in order to integrate cusomter's experience into their production process and how to organize the company in order to do it. A must read book for 21st century human, why? because any interaction is an experience and if you extend the metaphor of product, any interaction is a 'product'. If you have been of good reputation, you will 'sell' well on whaterver you say or do. Because people 'buy' it.

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