Outside Innovation: Outside Innovation Book Project And Patterns

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.

Twitter Accounts

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.

April 05, 2006

Outside Innovation Book Project And Patterns

As I am in the final throes of wrapping up the first draft of the manuscript of Outside Innovation, I realize that the learning has just begun. The process of researching and writing a business book is a "learn-by-doing" process. No matter how much you thought you knew when you began, you find yourself humbled by how much there still is to learn and explore. Luckily, that learning and exploration never stop! And, I appreciate the many of you who have embarked on this journey with me—offering suggestions, contributing your ideas and your stories, and even in some cases, your prose! I look forward to continuing the dialog.

Whenever I engage in big research projects like this, there are always things that surprise and delight me along the way. Here are a few of my current delights:

Big Momentum around Customer Communities. I was taken by surprise at how important online customer communities have become. These are springing up organically among consumers of all ages, around all kinds of topics. The best ones often start outside of your organization, but by carefully monitoring them, you can learn a huge amount about what customers care about. And, if you are good and careful, you can create your own vibrant customer community. Some of these communities rise and fall, like fads. Others continue for years, with new people joining and others departing. They organize themselves around tasks—e.g., troubleshooting and problem solving, new product ideas and development, marketing and promotion, customer-created products or extensions to share, tips and techniques, and guides and orientation. The more structured they are, the better they seem to work.

Huge Amount of Customer Creativity and Improvisation. It's mind boggling how much customer creativity is visible online these days. From the billion-plus photos on Flickr and the crazy videos on UTube, sorry, YouTube, to the podcasts and music mixes, to the anime videos, to the tens of thousands of mash ups, to the hundreds of thousands of blogs—the list goes on and on. There seems to be a huge pent-up amount of end-user talent, creativity, and know-how that is suddenly visible. People want to express themselves, to show off their expertise, to roll their own, and to share it with others. This behavior seems to cross age boundaries and to be happening in business as well as consumer activities.

Enlightened Attitudes towards Intellectual Property. Since inventors, publishers, software developers, musicians, artists, and molecular biologists are all revealing their own creations to the world online, people seem to appreciate being able to build on each others' work respectfully, with attribution. Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons ideas seem to be taking off. It's become easy to be clear about what rights you are willing to grant to others—commercial or non-commercial use, with attribution, with or without the right to create derivative works, to extend or modify, and whether those modifications need to be contributed back to the Commons.

Posted by Patty Seybold on April 05, 2006 in Customer Innovation, Customer Roles in Innovation, Intellectual Property, Outside Innovation | Permalink