Venkat Ramaswamy (venkatr@umich.edu) is Founder and Chief Mentor of the Experience Co-Creation Partnership.  He is also the Michael R. and Mary Kay Hallman Fellow of Electronic Business and Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.

Venkat is a globally recognized thought leader, idea practitioner, and an eclectic scholar with wide-ranging interests in innovation, strategy, marketing, branding, IT, operations and the human side of the organization. He is a prolific author of numerous articles, including the best-selling Harvard Business Review article "Co-opting Customer Competence," the Strategy and Business article "The Co-creation Connection", and the 2004 MIT Sloan Management Review PriceWaterhouseCoopers award-winner “The New Frontier of Experience Innovation”, and the acclaimed book "The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers" (co-authored with C. K. Prahalad).

His current work focuses on migrating companies globally to the next practice of value co-creation, how to innovate experience environments, how to leverage technology as experience enablers and communities of individuals and networks of firms for co-creating value, how to build the capabilities and processes for customer-company interactions and experience co-creation, how to build bridges between marketing, HR, IT, and operations around customer experiences, how to build the brand through personalized experiences, how to manage the quality of experiences, and how to build and lead the co-creative organization for sustainable growth.

What is 'Co-Creation of Customer Experience'?

Francis J. Gouillart (fgouillart@eccpartnership.com) is Founder and President of the Experience Co-Creation Partnership. He is a sought after consultant and coach. Francis is co-author (with James Kelly) of the book “Transforming the Organization”, published by McGraw-Hill, which reached the top of Business Week’s best-seller list in 1995.

He is also co-author (with Frederick Sturdivant) of the article “Spend a Day in the Life of Your Customers”, published by Harvard Business Review (January-February 1994).  He also authored the popular “Stratégie pour une Entreprise Compétitive”, Editions Economica, Paris, which was named ‘Best Strategy Book of the Year’ by the French Association of Strategic Planners (AFPLANE) in 1989.

He is considered one of the leading authorities on the topic of strategy, innovation, transformation, and capabilities-building.  He has been widely quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Fortune, and has been featured on CNBC.

The Experience Co-Creation Partnership provides workshop, executive education, training, and capability building services on the topic of experience co-creation. We are committed to the global application of their practice and travel extensively all over the world. Typical interventions with companies start with an introductory workshop and typically evolve into a combination of cascading workshops, coaching and consulting interventions. Our primary role is to coach members of the organization in the application of the experience co-creation concepts and help companies migrate to the next practices of value creation.