Outside Innovation

Google Wave: It’s "My" Design, but Will I Use It?

I'm pretty sure that I’m responsible for the design of Google's new Wave. I can't take full credit. There are millions of Gmail/Google Chat users like me who no doubt provided the pattern on which Google's new weird communications offering is based.

I haven't yet had the pleasure of trying out Wave. But thanks to early tester, Rafe Needleman's Hands-on with Wave: Weird and quite wonderful, I recognized, right away that I was probably at least partly responsible for the breakthrough design pattern on which Wave is based.

"Getting started in Wave: It looks a lot like e-mail..."

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

People Learn from People

Another pattern I noticed among our Visionaries was the various ways they connect people to people in the online world. As one participant said, “People don’t learn from information; they learn from people.”

On Visionaries’ Web sites, you notice that students can interact with one another, find experts, interact with their coaches and teachers. Customers can connect with other customers with similar issues as well as with their sales team. Consumers can glean tips and tricks from one another. Customers can see a product that someone else has customized and reuse those patterns to create their own customized product. Seekers can look at a graphical network of experts in a particular field and find the people whose expertise has been frequently published or patented. They can see who else is connected to those experts.

Most visionaries seem to feel that part of their job is to connect their customers with one another so they can learn from one another and share experiences. They also believe in connecting customers with internal experts and resources. They recognize that customers’ needs bridge organizational silos and pull employees and subject matter experts together across those silos. They realize that referrals, social networking, and viral marketing are the engines that drive customer acquisition.

Business Exchange: Good Example of Crowd Sourcing and Social Networking

Ron Casalotti is the Director of User Participation for Business Week’s Business Exchange. Ron’s understanding about how to encourage user-generated content comes naturally. He became addicted to AOL’s online communities in the 1990s. By day, he worked in the leasing business. At night, he would join live chat groups on topics he cared about. Soon, he found himself volunteering as a moderator for a number of AOL communities, including the really popular gaming chat groups.

After serving as a volunteer moderator in exchange for free AOL time, AOL made him an offer in 1997 to come on board full-time to run a number of their most popular communities. After over 10 years hosting and managing communities at AOL (weathering the Time Warner merger), Ron posted his resume on LinkedIn and was immediately tapped by Business Week to come and run customer-generated content at the new Business Exchange site they were planning. “Once I decided to leave AOL, I thought I’d be job hunting for a while, but I walked across the street, and settled into my new job in less than a week.”

LEVERAGE!! You can use your LinkedIn Profile, saving time so you don’t have to create yet another profile! And, when you post on Business Exchange you can have those posts syndicated out to your Twitter feeds.

Leveraging Business Users’ Existing Investments in Social Media

Use Your LinkedIn Profile. Before talking with Ron, I took a look at the site. What immediately tickled me about the Business Exchange site is the way that users’ profiles are “automagically” generated from the profiles we already have on LinkedIn. What a relief, I thought! I don’t have to create yet another profile to participate in this dialog! (You may recall my earlier post “Where’s Your Profile Online?”.) When you register for Business Exchange, you can use your LinkedIn Profile, saving time so you don’t have to create yet another profile!

Tweet Your Responses. Equally useful (for those of us who are overwhelmed by all the demands on our time and our new found need to strut our stuff in public), when you post on Business Exchange, you can have those posts syndicated out to your Twitter feeds. This is a really clever way to convince time-pressed business people that it’s worth their time to read and comment on Business Exchange. And it’s a great way to spawn word of mouth PR.

Contribute Your Content or Content You Value

Here’s the crowd sourcing part: Registered users can contribute articles on a variety or topics, and/or suggest new topics. Your contributed articles wind up right next to the Business Week articles that have been selected and added to the Business Exchange collection. The other thing that’s quite amazing about Business Exchange is how easy it is to add articles to it. These may be articles you’ve written, or articles you’ve found in other publications that you think Business Exchange readers would enjoy. You simply hit the submit button, enter the URL, and it will grab the title and abstract from the originating site, create a link, and all you need to do is comment (if you want to) and hit enter. You might think that this would lead to the site being cluttered with self-promoting junk. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Since you can only submit URLs, rather than blog directly on the site, all of the linked news items and blog posts seem to be of “publishable” quality. If it’s your own blog post, you publish first on your blog, and then submit it to Business Exchange. (It will post right away; you don’t have to wait for approval). If it’s a link to an interesting article or blog post from someone else, Business Exchange creates the links, includes the logo of the originating site and respects their copyright by simply linking to it on the original site.

What’s Missing: Threaded Discussions

Something I find odd about the current Beta version of Business Exchange is that it isn’t very easy to see others’ reactions to articles. Under each article’s abstract you can look at the “Actions” taken on that article, and see which users have saved or reacted to it and what their reactions were. But it’s hard to find. And, there’s no threaded discussion/blog commenting capability that lets you build on others’ reactions (yet). There’s no real discourse happening on the site. Just a lot of great content and interesting people.

When Customers Take You to Unexpected Places

This week I attended a series of panel discussions at Harvard University at the Education in Africa conference and the Kennedy School Bridge Builders program. There were two great stories that really struck a chord with me.

Girl Entrepreneurs

Viola Vaughn is the executive director of 10,000 Girls, a program she founded in Kaolock, Senegal in West Africa. Here’s the story she told about how that program started. Viola is a black American who grew up in Arkansas. She has a doctorate in education from Columbia and spent her career in education in the US and Africa. In 2001, Viola and her husband, Jazz musician Sam Sanders, emigrated to Senegal with their extended family. She said, “I was just planning to sit back and watch my banana trees grow.” But a little neighbor girl kept showing up at her house and asking Viola to teach her. Viola told her she was retired and didn’t do that anymore. Besides, she said, “I don’t teach, I educate.”

But the girl was persistent. She had heard that Viola’s granddaughter was being home-schooled. She wanted home schooling too. Finally, Viola went to visit the girl’s mom to find out why she wasn’t in school. The mother explained that her daughter was “too dumb to go to school.” Viola’s response was “well, she was smart enough to find me!” She relented and invited the girl to come over for lessons. When she arrived, she brought a bunch of other little girls—all of whom had dropped out of the local schools. (In Senegal, Viola explained, if you fail twice, you’re excluded from the public education system.)

Soon, the home-schooling program was outgrowing Viola’s home and she needed to hire more staff. She told the girls they would need to raise money if they wanted to continue their education. They responded by saying, “in America, girls sell cookies to earn money. Do you know how to bake cookies?” The next thing she knew, the girls had set up a bakery operation and were producing and selling enough cookies to hire a few teachers. Later in the story, she said the bakery led to a tea plantation. The girls found got someone to donate the land, and began planting and growing tea. When they applied for Fair Trade certification, they were originally denied because the Tea Plantation used “child labor” – the girls were working on the plantation after school. Viola explained to the officials that the girls weren’t the labor; they were the owners of the plantation. The money from the plantation went into their bank accounts. In fact, they hired young men to do much of the work. So they got their fair trade certificate.

Football; Not Roads

Jacqueline Akello, the program director at Uganda Rural Development and Training Programme (URDT), talked about the surprises that occur when you follow customers’ lead. Her URDT team went to a village that had invited them to help the community do some development work. As they arrived on site and got a tour of the village, it became obvious to the URDT staff that the thing the villagers really needed the most was an improved road that would let them get produce to market and to gain access to local healthcare. They had mobilized other villagers who wanted to improve their roads, so they were expecting that that would be the project the people in the village wanted. But when everyone started talking about their visions, the idea that popped to the top of everyone’s list was to be able to play football (what Americans call soccer). Their community hadn’t been able to field a team. They didn’t have a place to play. They weren’t participating in the district league. So, the villagers decided they would do what it took to get a football team off the ground. Soon, they had not only cleared a field, organized a team, and gotten uniforms, but they began to win some games.

Jackie reported that, within a season, many of the people in the village were socializing in ways that they hadn’t been before. The football club had created a missing social network. Soon, they began to think about improving the road so that visiting teams would have an easier time getting to their field to play. Sure enough, within a year, they mobilized community members to improve the road leading to the village and to the football field.

But they didn’t stop there, Jacqui reported, within two years, the same group of villagers had worked together to build a school which now houses 1200 students! The moral of the story? Let customers lead. They’ll take you on a surprising and interesting journey!

Why Twitter Rules (and What to Do About It)

In the past few months, the Twitter phenomenon has reached epic proportions. Personally, I chalk this up to the malaise that is gripping us all as we struggle to make sense of both the economic crisis and the political seismic shifts that are upon us. Not content to consume news media and blogs, we now all want to make sense of it, to share our observations, and most of all to connect. So this odd 140-character microblogging platform, known as Twitter, has ballooned in importance. In the last week, the Financial Times published a full-page article about Twitter. U.S. Congresspeople tweeted during Obama’s speech to the joint houses of Congress, and Keith Olbermann’s CountDown described the Congressional "Twits tweeting," and John Stewart ran a great spoof on the new Congressional pastime of tweeting. (The software is called Twitter; the short messages you send are called “tweets.” And yes, anyone who IS anyone is doing it.) The best way to get up to speed on Twitter in my opinion is to use the Twitter How To's and links at Mashable. Feel free to drop me a note. My twitter handle is pattyinboothbay.

How Should Your Company Deal with Twitter?

No matter what your personal opinion is about this phenomenon/fad, you should take note about how your customers and prospects are using Twitter and how your company should be engaging with them using this popular tool.

1. Best Use of Twitter: Real-Time Customer Support. The best way to win the hearts and minds of customers and prospects is to set up a twitter search filter on your company’s and product’s name(s) and to ensure that your customer support organization is tracking and responding to these tweets in real time. Oddly enough, when someone is stuck in line at an airport, having trouble with your Web site, or having difficulty using your product, they are highly likely to tweet about it (before they send you an email or call your support line or while they’re doing so). It’s an easy way for people to vent frustration and reach out to the world. If your customer support team responds quickly, both with a public tweet (so others will know you’re listening) and with a Direct Message to offer personal assistance, you will not only solve that customer’s issue but have that positive experience re-tweeted. Here are a couple of good examples:

• Andybeal: Ordered from Office Depot for the first time—won’t use them again. No delivery Thurs—too busy to deliver. Friday? No explanation & no package

• edwinaoki: Comcast outage. Can't get to anything east of Denver. They say "they hope to have it fixed by 8pm". That's 13 hours!

• TESFox: I have to say, Comcast is doing an excellent job of being there for customer service. Hats off for @comcastcares and the live chat team!

2. Planning and Managing Events. Whatever event you’re planning—whether it’s a local gathering of wine connoisseurs, a training class, a big user conference or a new product launch, Twitter should be part of your pre-, during and post-event communications plan. You can create a buzz before the event and encourage participants to tweet their notes, impressions and commentary during the event, and buzz after the event. You can make it easy for groupies and participants to retweet by providing hashtags (#ourevent) that they can embed in each tweet to make it easy to filter and search.

• gavangibson: #UBL Saul Kaplan: innovation=better way to deliver value to customer; zappo.com, virgin

• UserAdvocate: So far #drupalcon:solr is a breath of fresh air. Looking forward to see where he's going with his take on information architecture

• RobynGreenspan: RT @HSMAmericas #WIF09 Patricia Seybold Confirms as Featured Blogger at the World Innovation Forum http://tinyurl.com/abbrxy

3. New Product Launches. Twitter is a great way to get the word out in seductive and non-intrusive ways about upcoming new products or services. Most companies offer a limited number of “beta invites” via Twitter. These become coveted and people start asking for them so they can be part of the in crowd.

• aneel: rt @somic: CohesiveFT launches VPN-Cubed for EC2 - Build-your-own [transatlantic] [on-demand] private network in cloud! http://bit.ly/xqUqa

• utopiah: @tonylucas a friend told me I should ask for a beta invite, since Im curious about cloud computing services, here I tweet ;)

4. Customer Outreach and Gentle Evangelism. Many brand managers have managed to find the perfect tone in their Tweets. They don’t barrage you with blatant PR or marketing. They ask for reactions. They thank you when you DO tweet about their products or brands. They float ideas. They engage with people.

• angie1234p: @RockYourDay Morning Dave. Have I got news for you lol Molson Canadian is on Twitter (@MolsonFerg) Thought you might find it interesting :) [PBS: Fans notice your presence!]

• BlakeSunshine: @jessiecarp I work at National Instruments on www.ni.com/community- hope your semester is off to a great start

5. Drive Traffic to Your Site, Blog, E-Store, YouTube. Apart from free give-aways, twitterers don’t appreciate blatant product pitches. They’ll “unfollow” you quickly. But we do love to pass around links to great funny videos, useful commentary, insightful analysis, useful tips and tricks. Make sure that your contributions include seductive links that people will value.

• artrox: RT @thebrandbuilder @alydesigns @peopledesign: '5 Lessons in Business Innovation' http://tinyurl.com/bnwmvb (design around your customer) [PBS: Note the ReTweet—being passed along—also the use of a “tinyurl” which saves space]

• it_world: The cloud and the public sector - water and oil?: Public sector CIOs should look to the leading cloud computing .. http://tinyurl.com/d7hmep

• QuadrilleKnits: we now have over 3,000 followers on twitter..Quadrille_Books, QuadrilleFood, QuadrilleEco, QuadrilleHome, Student Cook, Jewish_Princess etc!

• doingmedia: @christinawodtke Congrats on the 2nd edition of Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web http://ping.fm/Tlv8A

6. Monitor Your Brand/Reputation. Twitter is the least expensive and most effective way to track your brand’s reputation online. You can just set up a search filter, turn the feed into an RSS feed (so you can capture and analyze it as it flies by) and then take actions to improve customer experience and/or amplify the good vibes.

• tivogrrl: “Enjoyed seeing USAA at Mx 2009. They are a financial services company that really gets customer service.”

• AdayVA: “@VistaPrint Thanks for ease of use and great customer service :)”

• richsharples: “Innovation loves a crisis, but only after customer have stepped out from under their desks” - classic Jonathan Schwartz quote [PBS: Jonathan Schwartz is the CEO of Sun—monitor execs’ names as well as company, brand and product names]

• josephnasto: Wal-Mart Customer Finds Human Teeth in New Wallet http://tinyurl.com/bt7zan

Analyzing Twitter Activity in an Integrated Web Analytics Platform

What if you are in charge of monitoring all search and social media activity around your products and your brands and constantly tuning your brand’s SEO and site merchandising? Ideally, you want an integrated approach for monitoring, analyzing, and taking action on the searches, tweets, blog posts, and buzz that’s swirling around your brand and your products. There are two keys to success:

1. Put the responsibility to monitor, analyze, and take action in the hands of a single coordinated team, don’t silo it across your firm’s PR, social media, e-commerce, SEO and site search, product and promotion merchandising, and customer support teams. Things move fast. You need to be able to get in front of the customer parade, not behind it! It’s fine to have distributed responsibilities for analyzing, tracking, and acting on customers’ buzz, interactions, and activity, but you’ll want to function as a virtual team, and ideally to use an integrated platform—one that lets you spot trends quickly and take action quickly.

2. Provide your team with integrated tools that let you monitor and analyze activity in real time across all of the different internal and external traffic sources that you monitor—those you control and those you don’t control.

The good news is that the leading-edge search analytics and e-merchandising platforms are embracing the leading edge social media trends.

Omniture Embraces Twitter

One of the top search analytics and e-merchandising platforms—the one used by the majority of large brands—is Omniture. It’s good news that the Mercedes Benz of e-commerce search and merchandising is moving with Porsche-like agility to embrace the leading edge social media platform. In a Mashable blog post, entitled: Omniture Adds Twitter Analytics for Brands, Jennifer Van Grove writes:

“You could try one of these 10 reputation tracking tools, but Omniture’s already powerful analytics product, SiteCatalyst, is now the first of its kind to actually import Twitter data for better measurement of brand activity. Omniture’s already powerful analytics product, SiteCatalyst, is now the first of its kind to actually import Twitter data for better measurement of brand activity.

Omniture currently boasts 5,100 clients—think AOL, Microsoft, Oracle, and eBay—capturing more than 1 trillion online transactions per quarter, and is now hoping to support their clients looking for Twitter insights on par with the standard Web analytics they’re used to receiving.

After importing Twitter data into SiteCatalyst, Omniture customers will be able to identify brand advocates and detractors, better acknowledge feature requests from loyal users, categorize Twitterers as customers, vendors, or employees, and get real-time alerts via email or SMS based on specified criteria like spikes in brand mentions. Users will even be able to generate limitless keyword reports - via tweet text scanning - to further segment, analyze, and dissect Twitter-related brand data.”

Celebrating Change Agents in the Developing World!

At a time when demonstrators are thronging the streets of London in protest over the global banking crisis and its impact in deepening the divide between first world and third world countries, a group of 3rd world entrepreneurs and innovators are convening across the ocean, right here in Cambridge, MA. This week, I am delighted to be hosting Jacqueline Akello, from the Uganda Rural Development and Training Programme (URDT). I can't wait to get an update on all the activities that have taken place on campus since my last visit. Jacqueline Akello has been named a Harvard University International Bridge Builder in 2009. She is one of 10 social entrepreneurs to receive this distinction. She will be participating in two exciting conferences at Harvard over the next 10 days.

EDUCATION FOR DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA

The first conference is Creating Opportunities: Education for Development in Africa. 

This is a one-day conference (Saturday, April 4th, at the Harvard School of Education). Jacquelyn Akello, from the Uganda Rural Development and Training programme (URDT) will be presenting on the topic of Girls' Education in Africa. She'll describe URDT's innovative Girls' School with its 2-Generation Education. These girls from disadvantaged rural families quickly become knowledgeable and respected community leaders, armed with practical know how about organic farming, solar energy, water sanitation, carpentry, and construction. Their families' incomes increase while the girls are at the boarding school because each family undertakes a "Back Home Project" that improves their living conditions and generates more income from cash crops, livestock, or a home business. Jacqui will also describe the African Rural University which is just completing its successful pilot phase, with the first class having co-designed and completed three years of study and practicum to become Rural Transformation Change Agents and Entrepreneurs.

Unlike other universities in Africa, ARU is unique in that its degree program prepares graduates to be rural leaders and social and business entrepreneurs; not to head to the big cities for jobs! Other notable speakers at this one-day conference include Calestous Juma who is Professor of the Practice of International Development and Director, Science Technology & Innovation, at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Marie Da Silva, a former nanny, who returned to her native Malawi to open a school for AIDS orphans and was recognized by CNN as a Hero of 2008. Here's a link to a video in which she describes that project. You can see all of the speakers' bios here.

HARVARD BRIDGE BUILDERS CONFERENCE

Each Spring, the graduate students at the Kennedy School of Government, many of whom come from all over the world, select a handful of change-agents/bridge-builders to honor and to learn from. The students manage this event, including raising the funds to bring these role models to Cambridge, MA. Here's how they describe these Bridge-Builders on their Web site:

"The 2009 International Bridge Builders Conference invites innovative pioneers from around the world to share their successes in fostering positive social change within and beyond their communities. These leaders are the ‘Bridge Builders’: rare individuals who cultivate solidarity between the multiple stakeholders involved in international development, grassroots movements, and social justice campaigns. This year, the 10 Bridge Builders exemplify commitment to public service and bring to Harvard a wealth of practical experience on many critical issues. The Conference, organized entirely by students, aims to broaden understanding of diverse cultures; inspire the translation of ideals into action; and contribute to a rich dialogue between theory and practice in international development."

This year's 10 Bridge Builders will be attending a customized-for-them/by-them conference at the Kennedy School of Government next week. They will be presenting and learning from each other as well as from development professionals and luminaries. The schedule has been organized to enable the public to participate in some of these discussions. Every day, there's an open panel, luncheon, or presentation. Here's the schedule of these open events for the week of April 6-10, 2009. All of these events are open to the public and will be held at the Kennedy School of Government.

Spreadshirt: Making It Easy to Be Your Own Brand

Like sneakers, custom-designed and printed T-shirts are a huge category in mass-customized products. Spreadshirt is one of the most mature companies in this space. It was founded in Leipzig in 2002 by Lukasz Gadowski and Matthias Spiess, and quickly became a European market leader in personalized clothing. The original idea wasn't a direct-to-consumer play, but an online shop partner that would empower small retailers to create and sell their own branded goods. With the combination of a well-designed Web infrastructure and custom manufacturing expertise, the firm grew from a prototype to a multimillion Euro global company.

CNN Partners with Spreadshirt

Make a Statement

CNN partnered with Spreadshirt to enable customers to make T-Shirts out of CNN headlines.

Refocus on Shirts and My Brand

Jana Eggers is now the CEO of this company, which has offices in Leipzig and Boston. "We're a creative, personalized apparel company. We have millions of direct customers and over 300,000 shop partners."

Jana told the story of the refocusing of Spreadshirt. "About a year ago, we refocused. We were producing a lot of custom merchandise: puzzles, clocks, lanyards, mugs, and, of course shirts. We went through a transition from "you think it, we'll print it" to a laser focus on making it about them—the customers and the products that carry the most emotional impact for them."

They did a lot of soul searching and research. "We asked our employees first; then we went to our customers." They asked customers: "What made it "your own label?" Jana explained. What they discovered is that wearable apparel packed a lot more impact than any other customizable object. And that telling a story or making a statement about yourself is the key emotional driver. Jana said that the phrase that really summed up the customer research for her was: "I wear my shirt every time it's clean." This was the big epiphany. "Shirts are very personal to them. People comment on them. They wear them proudly. We also learned that the process of creation is a really important part of the perceived value of the experience. Many customers commented that they wanted to spend more time in creating their customized shirts; not less."

Mars Direct: Personalizing Candy & Expressions

Personalized Expressions

Dan Michael, the R&D Director of Mars Direct, told "the story of how and why a personalized chocolate business was started and grown within a mass market snack food company." He briefly described the evolution of Mars Direct which currently sells, manufactures, and delivers personalized M&Ms and Dove Chocolates. "We're not a candy company; we're a personalized expressions company," Dan emphasized. "We make special moments more magical. The giver makes meaningful moments more magical through personalization." Personalized M&Ms are used at birthdays, weddings, company bashes and sporting events. "My Dove" chocolate bars, with specially printed messages on the foil wrap, have been used to propose marriage as well as to celebrate events.

My M&M's

Create Your Personalized M&Ms

For each order, you select from among 22 colors and create the verbiage you'd like. Add imagery, including photos.

My M&Ms. I have personal experience with My M&Ms®. I've ordered them for my grandkids' birthdays. They're always a big hit. I learned about them from an online ad at myrecipes.com. It's quick and easy to go to the mymms.com site and use the online tools to select your colors, type in your message(s), and select your packaging. As of June, 2008, you can also upload an image or a logo and have it printed (in black) on a colored M&M.

One of the things the My M&M team has learned is that customers not only want to personalize their candy to tell a story or to commemorate an event. They also want to customize the packaging they select. Depending on the event, customers may choose to have the personalized candy delivered in bulk (so they can pour it into bowls), or wrapped in cellophane bags, or delivered in boxes or tins. Dan reports that the most popular options are currently the 7 ounce cellophane wrapped bundles and the bulk delivery.

My Dove. The customization of M&Ms packaging gave the Mars Direct team the idea to use custom packaging as the personalization mechanism for other snacks—ones that don't lend themselves to printing on the candy. The personalized expressions that customers create for My Dove candy bars are printed on the foil paper used to wrap the candy.

When you visit the Mydovechocolate.com site, you'll discover a wealth of seductive personalization and customization options. You can select the type font, create multiple messages, and select the color of foil wrapping. You can select among a wide variety of gift boxes, with different types of chocolates and different packaging options, e.g., ribbon colors, and so on.

American Power Conversion: Profiting from Smart Customization

Lars Hvam and Niels Henrik Mortenson head up the Centre for Product Modeling at the Technical University of Denmark's Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Management. At the MIT Smart Customization Seminar, they presented several compelling case studies of smart customization in action among their clients. These are all major B2B manufacturers who have been applying the principles of smart customization and modular design of product lines and business processes for several years.

These cases are covered in more detail in their recently published book, Product Customization.¹ One of the most detailed accounts that Lars and Niels presented included highlights from American Power Conversion.

The Importance of a Product Variant Master

Niels Henrik Mortensen and Lars Hvam described how American Power Conversion created a streamlined modular product line by mapping out the current product assortment and processes and then simplifying them.

Dramatic Reduction in Lead Times by Moving from Engineering to Configuration

American Power Conversion (APC) is a multibillion dollar provider of complete power management systems for data centers, access providers, business networks, and home/small office.

It used to take APC 18 months to design, configure, and deliver the power management infrastructure for a data center for on-site assembly. Today, the company's 35,000 customers receive (or generate) a quote in less than an hour. The lead time for delivery of a complete infrastructure system for a large data center has been reduced from 400 days to 16 days! Since the systems arrive pre-assembled, on-site installation and integration has also been dramatically reduced.

Customers and technical consultants no longer engineer these complex solutions; they configure them. American Power Conversion's configuration and ordering systems are used by more than 10,000 sales engineers and dealers worldwide as well as by the majority of APC's customers.

APC manufactures standard modules in the Far East (power supply, air conditioning, cabling). All of these modules are mass produced. "The manufacturing is planned and executed based on the product and manufacturing specifications generated in the configuration systems," they explained. Most systems are then pre-assembled in one of APC's 15 assembly distribution centers around the world.

*Endnote*
1) Lars Hvam, Niels Henrik Mortensen, Jesper Riis. Product Customization. Springer, 2008

*Endnote*

Adidas Pioneered in Providing Custom Footwear

Adidas has been a true long-time pioneer of mass-customization. The company has tried many different approaches over the years and has learned a lot from all of them. At the MIT Smart Customization Seminar in November 2008, Alison Page, Manager of Customization at Adidas, gave a great presentation covering a few of the highlights.

Adidas sprang to fame when, in 1955, the German soccer team beat the favored Hungarian team to win the World Cup. This upset was dubbed "The Miracle of Bern." The German team was wearing Adidas boots with removable studs. When the rain came, they screwed the studs onto their shoes and won the match against the Hungarians.

Customizing Sports Performance Shoes: High Tech/High Touch

Although Adidas had always kept up the tradition of designing customized shoes for top athletes, it wasn't until the late 1990s that Adidas decided to make customized shoes available to the mass market. mi adidas, the mass-customization operation, was piloted in 1999 and launched in 2000 to bring custom footwear to the common person.

The Adidas approach to the custom design of performance shoes relies heavily on well-trained knowledgeable experts—people who understand both fit and performance and can truly add value to the co-design activity. Starting in the late '90s, Adidas outfitted a number of its retail outlets to provide custom fitting and custom design services. They also brought the custom design skills and technology to major sporting events. I described the approach in my book, Outside Innovation¹, quoting from a case study co-authored by Frank Piller:

"'The company provides a service that, until now, was only available to top athletes…Customers' feet are scanned using a foot scanning system, in order to determine the exact length, width and pressure distribution of each foot.'² This information is entered into a software program at a sales kiosk to determine the best-fitting shoe. The customer is then given prototype shoes in the right fit and style to try on. 'Once satisfied with fit, the customer designs the color elements and selects material preferences. All of these steps are performed with the help of a sales kiosk leading the customer through the co-design process, supported by a sales clerk.'³ The shoes arrive within three weeks."⁴

Over the years, Adidas has continuously refined the technology assists that it provides its personnel to custom design performance shoes. In 2006, Adidas opened an Innovation Centre in Paris which includes a pressure sensitive treadmill used to capture runners' gaits as well as the use of touch screen and handheld technology for customers and trained associates to capture fit and to select and to customize the shoe designs. Here's a YouTube link⁵ to a video describing the experience.

In Store Design of Adidas 

Originals footwear in the mi Originals retail execution

The look and experience is reminiscent of a tattoo parlor. Customers can browse samples while they create their own custom designs for selected shoe styles.