Co-development helps best associate the contractor’s and subcontractor’s teams to ensure a quick, most efficient development of new preparations. The whole process must be carried out in accordance with permanent regulatory quality and compliance requirements.

As working methods are being revolutionized by digital technologies, everyone needs to adapt their methods to new developments and modern tools. As a matter of fact, a new interesting initiative suggests a new approach. Showcased for the first time at the Cosmetic 360 innovation show, the new digital, connected application ‘Live Co-Creation Fab Lab’ by Procoluide transforms the traditional codes of product development and customer-contractor relationship: thanks to a creative, interactive interface, the brand can actually monitor its development by ‘live’-creating its product itself.

The idea of this tool results from several parameters

• No one knows everything about the market, trends, and new launches, whether it be customers or contractors. So, the insights they have are obviously complementary.
• SMEs, just like major companies, contractors, brands, or distributors, would do well to ‘merge’ their knowledge and expertise to innovate and be more competitive. This is even clearer with the development of increasingly more popular open innovation processes.
• Co-creation is relevant with this open innovation trend, as it is a real competitiveness and innovation lever: adding customers’ and contractors’ expertise cannot but generate more performance and increase the innovation capacity of both partners.
• In practice, customers usually set up their own brief, independently of their partners, without necessarily having a clear, accurate vision of the solutions the latter could suggest. At the end of the day, a more advanced and well-thought-out collaboration between these entities might result in more detailed briefs and better-designed solutions and, consequently, enhance their development and innovation capacity, while reducing an important issue for everyone: time to market.

As an answer to these problems, Live Co-Creation Fab Lab provides

• More efficiency and productivity when meeting customers : Customers define their projects on the live creation application in collaboration with the reps, by means of an interactive, creative platform. They design the whole product by accurately defining its texture, active combination, colour, perfume, and type of packaging, while anticipating regulatory constraints by choosing the tests to be performed, taking into account their blacklists and targeted markets.
• The R&D team presents the most qualitative and innovative actives available on the market.
• An agile, perfectly safe development approach which both enhances innovation and optimizes the time to market. Development is accelerated, in compliance with the harshest quality requirements, and in accordance with a strict ingredient selection protocol and rigorous formulation controlled and monitored by the technological centre.
• It is easier to explore the different solutions available both thanks to the ease of use of the application and its capacity to enhance creativity: it provides a huge freedom of creation and improves conceptual research by relying on the digital experience (libraries for textures, perfumes, and ingredients, palette of colours, selection of ‘virtual’ packaging), and the sensorial experience (physical library of textures, perfumes, and colours). In parallel, it also makes it possible to create variants of the product being designed and analyze solutions from different angles.
• The brief is validated efficiently , and is as close as possible to customers’ desires and needs: information is immediately sent to the R&D team, and everyone can start working quickly. After the validation, customers receive an e-mail to recap the brief: it can be used for the follow-up.

This original, relevant approach was worth being mentioned. There is no doubt it will provide the various operators, for whom speed, quality, and reactivity lie at the core of their daily issues, with a means to significantly enhance their development processes.

Learn more
• Watch the presentation of the Live Co-creation Fab Lab application by Procoluide on YouTube

Jean-Claude Le Joliff