Early Book Fodder

So much for branding/titling—what’s in the book? Here’s some early fodder:

Customer Innovation: Can You Harness It for Competitive Advantage?

What is customer 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 customers to build a customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services. It’s big business. It’s inevitable. It’s scary. It’s exciting. It’s dangerous to your business if you’re not prepared.

Will your company miss the next and by far most sweeping tide of customer-led innovation? This tide is big. And, it’s going to get bigger. Unlike a tidal wave, which flattens everything in its path, the customer innovation surge is more like water pouring over a dam. It keeps coming. It generates tremendous energy, powers new services, and provides new growth opportunities. It opens new markets and spawns new products. It transforms industries. It changes business models. But if you aren’t ready, you won’t catch the outside innovation wave, and you may be waiting a long time to find another one.  Don’t let that happen!

How Can You Channel Customer Innovation to Grow Your Business?

What can you do to channel customer energy into a positive direction—one that will power your business rather than sink it? Here’s the answer: engage your customers in more ways to help you redesign your business, your products, your processes, and your business models. You’ve already begun to open the flood gates by giving your customers the ability to do business with you electronically. You’ve felt the excitement of working shoulder-to-shoulder with specific customers to help them solve problems or design new products. You may have already empowered customers to solve each others’ problems. Your executives are immersed in customer meetings. You’re sprinkling your organization with customer survey data and customer loyalty scores. But that’s drip irrigation. Now it’s time to turn the spigots on full—invite customers to play more roles in driving your business direction.

Break Down the Barriers

For 20 years, we’ve been advising business and technology executives as they’ve struggled to redesign their organizations from the outside in—to become customer focused, customer centric and customer adaptive. We’ve found this to be very hard work. It’s rewarding. It’s fun. But, it takes time and energy to buck the tides of organizational inertia. The customer champions in most of our client companies often feel battered and exhausted. They’re baffled by how difficult it is to move from lip service to truly driving priorities from their customers’ points of view. But the tide has suddenly turned.

The Customer Revolution that we predicted in 2001 is now in full swing. Customers have taken control. They’ve already begun chipping away at your margins, your business models, and your intellectual property. They’re drilling holes in your dikes. They’re opening the valves on your locks, with and without your permission.

Let Your Customers Take Charge of Your Company!

This radical customer behavior is good news for customer champions and customer advocates. Your job has just become easier. Now, all you need to do is tap your customers’ creative energy and direct it in ways that truly benefit your business.

The best way to do this is to give your customers jobs to play in designing the workflows and scenarios they need. Give them roles to play in channeling your products and services in new directions that will yield greater results for them and for you. Unleash your customers’ creativity. Harness the energy they produce as they break new ground, encounter and overcome obstacles, gain new insights, and generate new ideas for their lives and your business.