IUJ's Symposium on Value Co-Creation in Tokyo brings together experts from multiple disciplines.

The veil of market exchange is punctured: producers creating "potential" value ex ante on one side and consumers realizing "actual" value ex post on the other is no more. Producers and consumers can create and realize actual value simultaneously and together. The ultimate source and determinant of value is personalized experience, which cannot be designed, packaged, and delivered through products. What a firm can do, along with other firms in an expanded network, is to provide environments for the consumer to co-create experiences, along with other consumers in communities. As Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004) forcefully argue, this potential to co-create can become a reality if the interactions are equipped with consciously designed and intuitively graspable mechanisms for dialogue, access, risk assessment, and transparency between firms and consumers. These mechanisms can already be implemented with emerging technological capabilities such as miniaturization, environmental sensing, embedded intelligence, networked communication, and adaptive learning systems to enable self- and remote-diagnostics, tracking and monitoring, connectivity and interactivity, mobility and seamlessness, and continuity and transformability. Far-reaching questions and implications of this paradigm shift are pursued by many visionaries, scholars, and technologists in diverse fields of thinking and research.

Synopsis
To generate new conversations and stimulate collaboration in this exciting area of value co-creation, International University of Japan (IUJ) is organizing an academic meeting:
IUJ Symposium on Value Co-Creation
Date: 12 May 2006, Friday, 9:45am - 6:00pm (registration starting at 9:15am)
Location: IUJ Tokyo Office GLOCOM Hall (15-21, Roppongi 6-chome)
Note: No entrance fee required. The symposium will be conducted in English.
Website: http://www.co-create.org/sym

Scope
Presentations are grouped into three broad areas of concern: consumption and marketing, creativity and design, and production and technology. Covering a wide variety of issues, the presenters will talk about:
• Value Co-Creation, Co-Creation System
• Innovation Networks, Consumer Communities
• Prosumer System, Customer as Innovator
• Intelligent Space, Experience Environment
• Interaction Design, Experience Design
• Participatory Design, User-Centered Design
• Collective Creativity, Creativity Support
• Collective Intelligence, Collaborative Engineering
• Agent-Based Modeling, Multi-Agent Simulation
• Emergence, Complexity

Presenters
The following distinguished scholars are confirmed to deliver presentations on the symposium:
• Prof. Nobutada Fujii: University of Tokyo, Research into Artifacts Center for Engineering
• Prof. Shuichi Fukuda. Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Technology, Faculty of Engineering
• Prof. Yutaka Hamaoka. Keio University, Faculty of Business and Commerce
• Prof. Hideki Hashimoto. University of Tokyo, Institute of Industrial Science
• Prof. Kumiyo Nakakoji. University of Tokyo, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, and SRA Key Technology Lab, Inc.
• Prof. Kerimcan Ozcan. International University of Japan, Graduate School of International Management
• Prof. Masaki Tomochi. Chuo University, Faculty of Policy Studies
• Prof. Kanji Ueda. University of Tokyo, Research into Artifacts Center for Engineering

Keynote Speaker
On this occasion, we are also much honored to feature as keynote speaker Dr. Venkat Ramaswamy, Professor of Marketing and Computer and Information Systems at University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Professor Ramaswamy has recently co-authored the book The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers (Kachi kyousou no mirai e – Kokyaku to kigyou no Co-creation, Harvard Business School Press, 2004) with renowned management guru Professor C.K. Prahalad. Having published a series of award-winning articles on value co-creation in prestigious journals such as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Strategy+Business (also in Japanese), and Journal of Interactive Marketing, he has been an invited speaker at Motorola, Nokia, HP, Honeywell, Infosys, British Airways, Nomura Research Institute, and Sony.

How to Participate
The number of participants will be limited to 75 to provide a participatory and productive environment for multi-disciplinary dialogue. If you want to reserve a seat for this event, please reply to Prof. Kerimcan Ozcan (ozcan@iuj.ac.jp) with a brief description of your professional and/or research interests and affiliations.