Outside Innovation: Vista

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.

Observations

LEAD USERS
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.

January 21, 2008

One Laptop per Child XO

What’s special about the One Laptop per Child XO (http://laptop.org/en/laptop/) computer is that it is designed for children in third-world countries. The XO is a very impressive piece of consumer electronics engineering. It includes a number of breakthrough implementations: low power consumption, a display that’s easy to read in the sunlight, a built-in camera and microphone, a flash disk, child-friendly user interface and applications, and mesh networking – each laptop acts as a wireless network router as well as receiver.

I ordered my OLPC computer using the Give One/Get One program. For $399, you receive one XO laptop for yourself and sponsor one for a child somewhere in the developing world. Mine arrived before Christmas. It would have been great to know where the “sponsored” one went and when it arrived.

My goal: test the XO laptop to see whether it might be useful for the Girls’ School (http://urdt.net/girlsSchool.html) in Kagadi, Uganda – where 240 girls (8 to 17 years old) from low-income, rural households participate in a unique, successful, and proven educational program. Their co-curriculum includes the approved national curriculum plus applied courses in organic farming, appropriate technologies (solar, computers, internet, water treatment, sanitation, etc.), radio programming, journalism, drama, music, gender/sex education, and visionary leadership training. The curriculum also incorporates a two-generation approach – students empower their parents with the skills they learn and, through “back home” projects, work with their families to improve their family’s living conditions and increase their incomes. This seems to me to be an ideal application for these hardy, laptop computers that the students could use on campus and take home with them to enrich and empower their communities.