Building a Culture of Co-Creation: at Mahindra
Venkat Ramaswamy and Naveen Chopra. 2014. “Building a Culture of Co-Creation: at Mahindra.” Strategy and Leadership 42 (1): Forthcoming.
Abstract:
In August 2010, Naveen Chopra, then senior general manager and head of Plant Quality for the Automotive Division of Mahindra, one of India’s largest vehicle manufacturers, attended a seminar on the topic of the co-creation paradigm of value creation[1]. Chopra recalls, “It’s such a simple, commonsense concept once grasped, but it also provided a structure and principles for daily use.” Co-creation emphasizes the need for creative collaboration and enhanced communication and co-ordination among stakeholders, and Chopra was constantly striving to improve precisely these practices across the five operating sites of Mahindra’s Automotive Division, a subsidiary of the conglomerate Mahindra Group. He decided to experiment with co-creation thinking by applying its principles first in the quality function. This case looks at the results as the experiment expanded[2].