Steinmann

He had been shopping for a new suit, the first in four years, on a Thursday afternoon and he stopped for a slice of pizza, some air conditioning and a soggy potato knish, and when he stepped out of the pizza shop onto the heat and confusion of the street, there was Shmuel standing in front of the silver shop with a large bag with fancy script—Steinmann's Silver.

The Last Lion Brittany Newmark 2011

He had been shopping for a new suit, the first in four years, on a Thursday afternoon and he stopped for a slice of pizza, some air conditioning and a soggy potato knish, and when he stepped out of the pizza shop onto the heat and confusion of the street, there was Shmuel standing in front of the silver shop with a large bag with fancy script—Steinmann's Silver.

The Last Lion Brittany Newmark 2011

While there is an inherent conflict between customer desires for affordable products and company requirements for profits, Steinmann imagined that if both parties could look at a live model of the product she would maintain, it would result in a better-integrated, co-created design.

The Power of Co-Creation Venkat Ramaswamy 2010

What lay upstream of the insurance specialist was as opaque to the retail branch advisor as the world of retail branch advisors was to Steinmann.

The Power of Co-Creation Venkat Ramaswamy 2010

Steinmann wondered whether Predica should build another community platform for end customers.

The Power of Co-Creation Venkat Ramaswamy 2010

“Unlike the web-based community of advisors, this product co-creation platform involves no real technology, at least for now,” Steinmann says.

The Power of Co-Creation Venkat Ramaswamy 2010

Over the ensuing weeks, as the conversation rolled back and forth among the product development group, the senior management of the firm, and the actuaries who were developing the product, Steinmann began to see the value of a novel co-creation process in designing and rolling out the new offering—one where decisions would not be made by the usual handful of experts, but by a much larger collective of Predica employees and customers.

The Power of Co-Creation Venkat Ramaswamy 2010

As Steinmann explains, It is always hard to make money with these low unit-price life insurance products, because the minute you involve experienced advisors, we start losing money.

The Power of Co-Creation Venkat Ramaswamy 2010

Examining the span of its interactions with other protagonists further, the product development team recognized a major shortcoming: Steinmann worked little with either retail branch advisors or customers during product design, except for an occasional focus group.

The Power of Co-Creation Venkat Ramaswamy 2010

Steinmann thought the new product should also be simple and more flexible.

The Power of Co-Creation Venkat Ramaswamy 2010