This week, Matt Locke of BBC New Media, (see his earlier comment Matt Locke's Comment on Lead Users and Innovation ) and his team have been holding a Lead User Innovation Lab in Manchester, UK. Thanks to their blog, I've been watching the week unfold. The participants are teams of Lead Users from new media companies in Britain. Their goal: create new mash-ups/applications based on BBC content.
Watching this Innovation Workshop really takes me back. We ran similar workshops in the early 90's with teams of lead customers who wanted to help each other redesign their businesses from the outside in. Like Matt's Innovation Labs, the hardest part was to keep everyone focused on the END CUSTOMERS--who they were, what context they were in, what THEIR desired outcome was.. That's how our Customer Scenario Mapping method was generated.. I'll provide the history in another post on another day... We also discovered that instead of pretending to be customers, it worked best to bring end-customers into the co-design session. That really keeps you focused on their vision, while, in my experience, not constraining the creativity at all...
In Matt's workshops, teams have taken turns presenting to one another (and to a BBC commissioner)-- a technique which we also discovered worked really well to keep the energy high and to crystallize (or throw out) work in progress. Like our teams of yore, Matt's customer and BBC Innovation Labs teams have worked and played into the night, brainstorming, prototyping, and honing their presentations. And, just like Matt's our final presentations included the "pitch".. in his case.. each team provides a press release as well as their presentation.. hoping to get press coverage for their idea... In our teams' cases, since they were developing technology/business initiatives that had to be sold internally, they provided business plans and implementation plans along with their customer scenarios and prototypes...
Watching the BBC Innovation Labs in action is a great way to see customer co-design and innovation in action. Although I have only been lurking, I can attest to the fact, from my own personal experience, that the customer innovation workshop design Matt's team is using will work. They will get usable and truly innovative results.
I recommend that you check out the action...BBC Innovation Labs The Manchester Innovation Lab is winding down this week. The Innovation Lab in London kicks off next week. What Fun!
