12 Roles Customers Play in Customer Innovation

What are the roles your customers should be playing in helping your business harness the energy of customer innovation to power its growth? In studying the best practices in customer-led innovation, we’ve discovered 12 key roles that customers are playing in reshaping companies and their products to better meet their needs. The smart companies are the ones that have recognized these roles and formalized them. They’ve given customers key roles to play in driving their businesses forward.

Give Customers Key Roles in Shaping Your Business

How many of these roles are your customers currently playing?

• Builders—Build their products on top of your products
• Change Agents—Change your business models
• Co-Designers—Co-Design their/your business processes
• Contributors—Contribute their products, solutions, ratings, and intellectual property to other customers
• Collaborators—Build on other customers’ designs to create new designs/products and make them available to others
• Creators—Create their own new products with your help
• Customizers—Configure their own products
• Inventors—Invent new products for you to sell
• Market Makers—Play a key role in evolving the design of your market and/or ecosystem
• Problem Solvers—Solve each others’ problems
• Promoters—Select and promote products for you
• Providers—Provide their stuff for you to offer and sell

Empower Customers to Play All of These Roles in Powering Your Business

Leading edge companies such as Google, eBay, and Apple have found ways for customers to play nearly all of these 12 roles. That should be your goal, too. Other companies, like yours, already include customers in one or more roles. For example, L.L. Bean, Lands’ End, Dell, Cisco and many others make it easy for customers to configure their own products. Staples and Lego have programs that reward customers who invent new products. Lego has made customer innovation part of its core brand promise. It’s Lego Factory is a great example, both of the unleashing customer innovation and of dealing with the unintended consequences of customer innovation. (See Frank Piller’s Post on November 1st: Lego Factory Hacked by Users—and the Company Loves It!)

Developers in the open source community and gamers in the online gaming community collaborate with one another—building on each others’ designs to create more functionality, characters, behavior, and value. Open source developers, gamers, and millions of traders on eBay also act as market makers. They provide the products that are being sold, as well as act as buyers and sellers in the marketplace. Karmaloop—an edgy retailer of hip clothes—relies on its customers to both spot new styles and to market them. Their customers are their promoters. Flickr’s customers provide products, posting their pictures for others to admire, use, and even purchase. Snap-On’s top technicians provide the rules that drive the software diagnostics for its millions of automotive technician customers around the world. National Semiconductor’s customers design their own products using National’s Webench^® software tools. GE Plastics’ customers co-design their products at GE’s innovation labs. Microsoft’s, National Instruments’ and many companies’ customers solve each others’ problems. Google’s customers build their own mapping applications on top of Google Earth. Apple’s customers provide their own Podcasts and build their own playlists. Amazon’s customers rate products, create lists, provide content, and buy and sell products as do those at eBay, et al. And, even more profound, in a little village in rural Uganda 12- to –17-year-old girls are designing curriculums for their own school and co-designing an African Rural University they can go to when they graduate from high school. The young women and their parents, running a radio station that reaches four million people, learning organic farming, and going back to their villages to teach their parents how to grow new crops, performing plays in neighboring villages to educate on AIDS and domestic violence, building solar panels, and running a Web site. This is all being done in an area of the country that 20 years ago was a tiny village with nothing and is now a teaming ecosystem, built by customers—girls who had no future—for customers—the next generation.

Customers will shape your future and create a thriving ecosystem if you’ll empower them.

The more roles you give them to play, the higher the payoff for your business.

The companies that are struggling to adapt to new market realities are the ones in which customers play a limited number of roles.

Comments

[Patty Seybold]

Mark,
Thanks for your encouragement. I agree with you. I think there are a lot of principles that companies in other industries can learn from the open source software movement. In fact, I'm looking for a good summary of some of the lessons learned in customer co-design of software--both the positive and the negative. Do you have any insights or pointers to share?

Thanks and Happy New Year!

Patty

[Mark Griffin]

Patty,
I think you have hit the nail on the head with how successful companies have engaged their customers. We are still in the early stages(I'm speaking of software vendors not the broader base as you are) but I see the open source model playing a huge role in shaping at the very least the software industry. The open source folks have figured out how to engage customers albeit informal but yet very effective. I think the traditional software vendors are going to begin to struggle a bit more with open source and its impact on how they develop and deliver software. The traditional software vendors are typically slow to market and usually do not hit the mark when delivering what customers want and need. There is definitely an art to interacting with the open source developers but the key is they are accessible. Unlike the walled off developers in traditional vendors, the open source developers do respond and interact with customers.

markg
http://darth.homelinux.net

[Patty Seybold]

James,
Absolutely. In fact, one of the fun things about my research to-date is finding all the hotbeds of activity in stuffy old companies as well as interesting new startups, where customers are at the center of the action!

Good point..

What did you mean about being "televised"?

Patty

[James]

Innovation also occurs in 195 year old institutions and your book should reflect this. Innovation is happening at all levels regardless of whether it is televised...

http://duckdown.blogspot.com/