Outside Innovation Book Project And Patterns

As I am in the final throes of wrapping up the first draft of the manuscript of Outside Innovation, I realize that the learning has just begun. The process of researching and writing a business book is a "learn-by-doing" process. No matter how much you thought you knew when you began, you find yourself humbled by how much there still is to learn and explore. Luckily, that learning and exploration never stop! And, I appreciate the many of you who have embarked on this journey with me­­­­—offering suggestions, contributing your ideas and your stories, and even in some cases, your prose! I look forward to continuing the dialog.

Whenever I engage in big research projects like this, there are always things that surprise and delight me along the way. Here are a few of my current delights:

Big Momentum around Customer Communities. I was taken by surprise at how important online customer communities have become. These are springing up organically among consumers of all ages, around all kinds of topics. The best ones often start outside of your organization, but by carefully monitoring them, you can learn a huge amount about what customers care about. And, if you are good and careful, you can create your own vibrant customer community. Some of these communities rise and fall, like fads. Others continue for years, with new people joining and others departing. They organize themselves around tasks—e.g., troubleshooting and problem solving, new product ideas and development, marketing and promotion, customer-created products or extensions to share, tips and techniques, and guides and orientation. The more structured they are, the better they seem to work.

 

Huge Amount of Customer Creativity and Improvisation. It's mind boggling how much customer creativity is visible online these days. From the billion-plus photos on Flickr and the crazy videos on UTube, sorry, YouTube, to the podcasts and music mixes, to the anime videos, to the tens of thousands of mash ups, to the hundreds of thousands of blogs—the list goes on and on. There seems to be a huge pent-up amount of end-user talent, creativity, and know-how that is suddenly visible. People want to express themselves, to show off their expertise, to roll their own, and to share it with others. This behavior seems to cross age boundaries and to be happening in business as well as consumer activities.

Enlightened Attitudes towards Intellectual Property. Since inventors, publishers, software developers, musicians, artists, and molecular biologists are all revealing their own creations to the world online, people seem to appreciate being able to build on each others' work respectfully, with attribution. Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons ideas seem to be taking off. It's become easy to be clear about what rights you are willing to grant to others—commercial or non-commercial use, with attribution, with or without the right to create derivative works, to extend or modify, and whether those modifications need to be contributed back to the Commons.

Comments

[Patty Seybold]

Thanks, Jeffrey!
Good catch.. I should have caught it! Thanks for doing so...

Patty

[Jeffrey McManus]

Whoops: "UTube" should be "YouTube" and it's http://www.youtube.com/