New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold
Description
What is Outside Innovation?
It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services.
The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes.
The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.
Eric von Hippel coined the term "lead users" to describe a group of both customers and non-customers who are passionate about getting certain things accomplished. They may not know or care about the products or services you offer. But they do care about their project or need. Lead users have already explored innovative ways to get things done. They're usually willing to share their approaches with others.
LEAD CUSTOMERS
I use the term "lead customers" to describe the small percentage of your current customers who are truly innovative. These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about.
LEAD CUSTOMERS AND LEAD USERS
We’ve spent the last 25 years identifying, interviewing, selecting, and grouping customers together to participate in our Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions. Over the years, we’ve learned how to identify the people who will contribute the most to a customer co-design session. These are the same kinds of people you should be recruiting when you set out to harness customer-led innovation.
HOW DO YOU WIN IN INNOVATION?
You no longer win by having the smartest engineers and scientists; you win by having the smartest customers!
CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN
In more than 25 years of business strategy consulting, we’ve found that customer co-design is a woefully under-used capability.
JP Rangaswami included a nice mention about my book, Outside Innovation, in a provocative post on his blog 6174 time for content: there’s a train crash a-coming -- about the collision course that content/digital rights management and intellectual property all appear to be on.
JP says:
We have group A marching to Content is King. We have group B marching to Customer is King....
Look carefully, and you will notice something weird about groups A and B.
Many people belong to both groups. ....
Along comes group C, and they march to the sound of a different drummer. Syncopation? Their mantra is:
Customer Content is King
Whoops again. That’s not the tune that Content is King is played to.
That’s not the tune that DRM is played to. That’s what ASCAP didn’t
figure out; that’s how BMI walked in, so eloquently described by Larry [Lessig].
There’s a train crash a-coming.
Whoops.
Only the customer can make content king. We must all remember that."
JP's post generated quite a bit of commentary--and introduced me to a great blog I had been missing!
In writing my recent book, Outside Innovation, I studied more than 30
companies around the world that have successfully harnessed
customer-led innovation to become market and industry leaders. What's
the one thing they all had in common? They all had vibrant online
customer communities.
Some of these were closed by-invitation-only communities, like those
hosted by Kraft, Unilever, Staples, and Hallmark. Others were open
communities, like those found on LEGO,Mozilla,National Instruments,
Flickr, and YouTube.
I got an excited phone call from Pat Kerpan, one of "Patty's Pioneers", about two minutes into Steve Jobs' presentation on Tuesday. I had been on a plane at the time, getting email updates before take-off by various members of my team, as well as the WSJ's instant analysis. Pat's take: "Say Good-bye to RIM Blackberry, Palm Treo et al." As a Blackberry addict, my skepticism kicked in. My first two thoughts were (naturally) about my own use. "Does it have push email? Does Cingular reach my home on a penisula in Maine?" (The answers are maybe and no). But taking my selfish needs aside, I want to personally thank Steve for once again disrupting the market by introducing a product category that is so USABLE and sexy.
Steve's brilliance in user interface and functionality design comes through once again (with the help of his usability experts). He is uncompromising in the areas where it really matters--not only the look and feel, but what the right mix of functionality and ease of use has to be in order for the product/category to meet customers' REAL needs. The iPhone will move us all firmly away from text messaging/email to high bandwidth video, multimedia and rich communication. Of course we'll continue to type or text messages. But I predict that we'll be sending more and more video clips around to communicate quick takes--for both personal and professional use. I'm glad I have six months to wait for my iPhone. I need the time to learn how to take and edit video so it's as easy as editing a document!
Over the holidays, I stumbled upon this amazing speech by John Thackara, the author of In the Bubble; Designing in a Complex World.
John spoke at a Competitiveness Summit held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London on December 7th, 2006.
John Thackara addressed the question:
"How best shall we use our creativity and innovation to stay ahead in the game?"
And, in answering this question, John described an unusual grass roots project, called DOTT, for "Designs of the Time" taking place in North East England, with the motto:
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