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.
I enjoyed Ryan Chin's presentation about the MIT Smart Cities' mobility on demand project. It's a compelling vision with some great green engineering (intelligent wheels, folding electric cars and one-way vehicle-sharing). An important next step: creation of the software required to manage the dynamic pricing required to incentivize people to return cars, scooters, and bikes to the locations with the most demand. Here's a link to my report on the innovative work being done by this team under the visionary leadership of Prof. William J. Mitchell at MIT.
Here's the great conceptual map that CollectiveNext created during Ryan's talk.
“Green
Engineering is the use of advanced measurement and control techniques
to design, develop, and improve products and technologies resulting in
environmental and economic benefits.”1
The good news is that, just as environmental issues are becoming more
and more critical to humankind, we now have affordable technologies
that enable us monitor and manage our (bio-)systems, reduce the
greenhouse gases we emit, lower the amount of energy we consume, and
thereby reduce our costs while benefiting our planet. Every engineer is
becoming a “green engineer” because all of us are now intent on
reducing carbon footprints and in saving money by reducing the energy
consumption of the products and processes we design and control.
How Is Green Engineering Done?
Today, an increasing number of scientists and engineers are designing
complex feedback and control systems that enable them to:
1. Monitor multiple data feeds from a myriad of sensors that detect and
capture analog signals (temperature, humidity, pH, gases, chemicals) in
real time.
2. Analyze these streams of input in near real time.
3. Correlate the relationships among the inputs to create a dynamic model of a complex system.
4. Take compensating or corrective actions by sending signals to
trigger actions based on real-time events, triggers, and thresholds.
I just finished a research project on “green engineering.” I interviewed pioneering “lead users” who have been designing new approaches to solving tough environmental problems using affordable, easy-to-deploy sensors and holistic feedback systems. I learned from a Malaysian mechanical engineer how he was able to monitor and control commercial air conditioning systems in the tropics to reduce his clients’ energy consumption by 30%. I learned from a PhD chemist and a controls engineer how they were able to design a zero emissions hydrogen-powered switching locomotive from commercially-available components and to develop a complex control system to keep it running safely. And I followed the story of a group of 24 biologists, engineers, and computer scientists as they teamed across two continents to model and monitor an unusually salty chain of lakes in Argentina.
What struck me as I completed this project (which was a “green engineering” white paper for National Instruments) was that the approaches these engineers and scientists are taking to address specific issues while saving our planet may be relevant for other kinds of businesses as well.
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