Update: In case you speak German, there is a great comprehensive summary of the event here: "Ich bin ein Prosumer - Brigitte Holzhauer berichtet von der Tagung "Prosumer Revisited" in the Magazin Change X."
This week, at the Goethe University in Frankfurt/M, Germany, an interesting conference took place. Organized by Birgit Blättel-Mink and Kai-Uwe Hellmann, two professors of sociology, the event wanted to review the long school of academic thought on prosumers and co-creating customers. The organizers gathered a diverse and interesting crowd of participants that provided insight from many different perspectives. Overall, it was an interesting event, even when I realized that in sociology, the majority of scholars still focused on mapping that the phenomenon of co-creation or prosuming customers exists, while in the management literature, the state of the discussion has moved one step forward in explaining the structures, methods, and contingencies of user participation in value creation.
Axel Brun, a scholar from Australia who participated in the conference, has written a very comprehensive report, summarizing all keynotes and many of the paper presentation in his blog. Axel is a Senior Lecturer in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. He has coined the term "produsage" to better describe the current paradigm shift towards user-led forms of collaborative content creation which are proving to have an increasing impact on media, economy, law, social practices, and democracy itself. For more information, have a look at his website, http://snurb.info.
Here are a few direct links to Axel's summaries of the conference keynote presentations:
- My opening keynote of the conference: http://snurb.info/node/970. This is a nice summary of parts of the talk and of my basic argument why user participation in the innovation process is important: to get access to sticky need information of customers.
- Holm Friebe, co-author of my favorite book "Marke Eigenbau". The book is a great summary of all topics I am writing about in this blog, and so was Holm's presentation: http://snurb.info/node/973
- Kerstin Rieder is the co-author of a rather critical book on the "working customer", that, when it appeared in 2006, seemed to me like a critical and pessimistic review of the self-service society. Missing many of the more recent developments of voluntarily co-creating customers- So I was glad to hear that in her talk, Ms. Rieder did extend the concept and also focused on the opportunities and advantages of co-creation for firms and, equally, customers: http://snurb.info/node/980
- Johann Füller from Hyve talked about the creation of brands by users. I have heard this talk before, but it again was fascinating to see how user-created brands challenge the marketing thinking of many decades: http://snurb.info/node/977
- The honorary keynote speaker of the conference was the famous sociologist and scholar of cultural studies, George Ritzer from the University of Maryland. He provided a nice historical overview of the prosuming customer, but -- as most speakers at the conference -- stopped when it got interesting, i.e. when new forms of co-creation emerge. But overall, it was a great experience to listen to Prof. Ritzer live: http://snurb.info/node/976
For summaries of many more talks, go to http://snurb.info/taxonomy/term/104
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