Best Practices/Take Aways from MIT User Innovation Lab Forum

I was privileged to attend Professor Eric von Hippel’s MIT Innovation Lab Meeting, which was hosted on the MIT campus on September 7th and 8th. Many of the participants were corporate sponsors of the User-Centered Innovation research that takes place at the MIT Sloan School under Eric’s oversight. The participants spanned industries--automotive, consumer packaged goods, education, government, healthcare, high tech, media/publishing, not-for-profits, and telecoms, and also included academics and legal experts. The presenters were all practitioners--people who are engaged in lead user innovation in their organizations.

Here are a few of the user-led innovation “best practices” I noted in the presentations and the wonderful discussions:

• Foment organizational transformation from the outside in--invite lead users to create derivative works out of your intellectual property, to share their creative ideas with one another, and to build their own “solutions” (gadgets, mash ups, applications, etc.) leveraging your company’s branded IP.

• Host co-design sessions with lead users. Invite creative professionals from multiple disciplines to creative workshops to co-design new concepts.  Select the best of these concepts to carry further, sponsor, and commercialize.

• Encourage customers to contribute ideas and content, to pose and solve problems, and to interact with one another in public online community spaces.

• Encourage your own employees to leverage customer-contributed content, ideas, and deliverables.

• Provide tools--like high-level programming languages and toolkits to promote lead user innovation--and offer training on those tools; make sure that each training class produces real deliverables or at least prototypes of new designs.

• Get all your stakeholders aligned around customers’ desired outcomes. Provide integrated, cross-disciplinary services and support to help customers reach their outcomes; enable customer-led, individually-optimized service delivery.

• Create expert networks and link customers to networks of experts. Make it easy for people to find the experts they need.

• Empower local community-based problem solving. Provide support and structure to enable community members to collaborate to solve common problems.

• Provide tools to end users/customers to manage their own complex situations (health, projects, etc.) rather than trying to do things for them.

• Provide electronic design tools to interested end users/customers to design their own products and to design your company’s products in open design communities. Encourage customer designers to critique and vote on each others’ work.

• Harvest user-generated ideas from across the Internet. Pull it all together and look at the patterns of needs and solutions.

It was a rich two days. There’s much more to chronicle. Stay tuned for the next installment!

Comments

[marvin]

All the user-led innovation best practices you noted in the presentations are really informative.Interesting topic.Thanks for the sum-up.
-----------------------
Marvin

Kansas Treatment Centers

[Kristen Ross]

UPCOMING EVENT ON INNOVATION!

Now's the time to sign up and take the lead on innovation!

The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) is hosting an exclusive consortium focusing on innovation. Registration is currently in progress.

Some of the top leaders in research and practice will share their thoughts about innovation during SIOP’s third annual Leading Edge Consortium Oct. 26-27 in Kansas City, MO. This is the first ever meeting of, innovation specialists, company executives and applied psychologists focused on the topic of enabling innovation in organizations.

The consortium, entitled “Enabling Innovation in Organizations,” will examine organizational structures, leadership styles, management practices, cultures, processes, and individual characteristics that help innovation flourish.

There will be three keynote speakers:
• Ed Lawler, director of the Center for Effective Organizations and distinguished professor of business at the University of Southern California
• Ingar Skaug, president and group chief executive officer of the global shipping firm Wilh. Wilhelmsen and chairman of the Center for Creative Leadership's board of governors
• David DiGiulio, a former research and development and human resources executive for Procter & Gamble

Held at InterContinental Kansas City at the Plaza, attendees will enjoy in-depth presentations alongside fun, including breaks, lunch on Friday and Saturday, and receptions on Thursday and Friday evenings. The popular topical dinners are scheduled Friday evening.

Consortium participants can expect to gain:
• Sharing ideas on the role of leadership and top management, knowledge transfer, and climate/culture issues relative to innovation
• Effective strategies for introducing innovative ideas and products that make a difference
• Provocative ideas emerging from practice and research
• An exploration of the dark side of creativity and innovation, including how to alleviate the negatives
• A fresh look at the psychological variables that enable staffing for team and individual creativity

Go to www.siop.org and click on the Leading Edge Consortium link for more information, including registration details and a full listing of speakers, titles and abstracts. You can also contact SIOP for more information at 419-353-0032. Call for group discount information and ask for communications specialist Kristen Ross.

Managing the vagaries of innovation – creativity and the process of turning ideas into products and services that add value to an organization – is one of the greatest challenges facing business leaders. Innovation is acknowledged as the fuel for economic growth, and in the modern competitive global marketplace, it is vital to maintaining growth. The organization that doesn’t innovate may very well stagnate.

Hope to see you in Kansas City!

[Patty Seybold]

Graham,
I would love to read your comments and take-aways from the Philips/Henry Chesborough and Ken Morse. I loved Henry's book! Really thoughtful and useful! I don't know Ken, but hope to meet him some time in Cambridge!

Pls. send along a link when your thoughts are available for sharing...

Thanks!

Patty

[Florian Komm]

Very interesting topic. We picked it up in your blog. It gives useful insides for the design of business models.

[GrahamHill]

Patty

I am attending an Open Innovation course organised by Philips and tutured by Henry Chesborough (who wrote the Open Innovation book)and MIT's Ken Morse in Eindhoven next week.

I will feed back some of the learning points from that course as well.

Graham Hill

[Patty Seybold]

Rafael,
No these were private presentations. But I do have permission from at least one of the presenters to summarize his comments... check back in a couple of days!

Patty

[Rafael Sidi]

Thanks for the summary. Are these presentations available publicly?
rafael

[Patty Seybold]

Thanks for noticing, Bill...

One of the participants at this conference that I had the pleasure of meeting in person was Kohei Nishiyama, the founder of Elephant Design, and the designer behind Japanese retailer Muji's customer-led innovation, which I chronicled in my book, Outside Innovation.

Perhaps you have some additional examples of customer-led innovation from Japan? If so, I'd be grateful for the suggestions!

Patty

[RisingSunofNihon]

It sounds like you had the opportunity to attend a fantastic conference! Thank you so much for sharing a bit of the info you took away from Professor von Hipple and the other participants. I'm looking forward to reading more about this!