Co-Creation & Local Motors

What Local Motors Revealed About Co-Creation and What’s Happening Next

CoFormation’s Interview wth David ‘Nemo’ Neal & Chris Stadler, former employees at Local Motors

Did you know that, for 15 years, Local Motors revolutionized the way vehicles could be designed and built?

Through a process called co-creation, it gave a worldwide community a genuine and extraordinarily powerful role to play in product development.

The Rally Fighter, for example, became the world’s first crowdsourced car, emerging from 35,000 designs contributed by 2,900 community members across more than 100 countries.

The Rally Fighter (Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rally_Fighter_Local_Motors_1.jpg)

This was a spectacular industrial achievement. There are several other examples, too.

Co-Creation proved something extremely powerful. People beyond a manufacturer’s walls could — and indeed should — help create real vehicles at speed and scale.

And right up until Covid struck, some of the world’s biggest companies did just that.

BMW Group said its experience with the Local Motors community “far exceeded our expectations.” GE partnered with Local Motors to pioneer “a new model for the manufacturing industry.”

David Neal and Chris Stadler were right there when it happened. Co-creation pioneers, they helped turn what at the time was a radical, largely untested idea into a working industrial capability.

So I sat down with both of them to get the inside scoop on what actually happened.

This is the story of what happened to co-creation, what Local Motors proved and why its next chapter will matter even more than its first.

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What now for Co-Creation?

As you will see from this interview, Co-Creation has already proven itself.

But the lessons learned open up a new vista of opportunities. Although birthed in the automotive sector, the principles behind its success apply to any industry sector.

When any group of people formed into a community has to make or create something together, it could do a lot worse than take the lead from Local Motors’ experiences.

It is certainly the case that Co-Creation encountered certain issues, which is what you’d expect for a way or working that was way ahead of the curve. However, technological developments over the past five or so years have now put those concerns to bed.

That’s why Co-Creation now has its own support act, taking its rightful place as the third of the five modes of CoFormation.

Once a community understands the reality of the situation they face, and the roles and responsibilities of the participants are properly defined, it has all conditions in place to build together properly.

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The basic premise is undeniably powerful. How much stronger would any organization become if it had a well governed and systematic way to bring its customers and users into the creation process?

If participants are allowed to engage fully and directly in the deveopment, testing, and improvement of a product, service, process, policy, standard, prototype — you name it — would that be for better or worse?

Could access to all this talent, insight, and capability outside the org chart — which necessarily dwarfs what exists inside it — become the difference between leading and following or even, in some cases, success and failure?

It’s difficult to believe that it wouldn’t. We’ve already seen the evidence.

And the effects extend far beyond the making process to how the product or service is received by the market itself — marketing, PR, recruitment, to name but a few of the downstream positive effects.

These are just some of the reasons why Chris and Nemo are now working with CoFormation to take Co-Creation back to where it should be, fully supported, and ready to make the difference for organizations looking to bridge the innovation gap.

To learn more, follow us here as we catalogue the Co-Creation revival.