Outside Innovation

Bill’s Philanthropy and Larry’s Stinginess

Last week Bill Gates stunned many people by announcing his plan to transition within two years away from driving Microsoft’s strategy to turn his near-full-time attention to solving some really hard problems: the educational crisis in the U.S., and the health crisis in the world. I wasn’t surprised. I remember sitting in Bill’s parents’ living room in December 1996 with a few other industry notables, when Bill said “I sure hope I’m not still running this company after I’m 50, I have other things I want to do with my life.” When I asked “like what?” he said that he wanted to focus on philanthropy.

I find it really encouraging that so many technology and e-entrepreneurs are investing their wealth and their considerable brain power to addressing many of the world’s toughest problems. Like Bill and Melinda Gates and their foundation, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, along with Jeff Skoll are deeply involved in supporting a variety of world-changing initiatives through Omidyar Network. And these are just the “big names.” I’ve found scores of people who did well in the high tech boom and are now very active—many of them full-time—in helping to change the world for the better. This is really exciting!

My own passion is supporting the “African Renaissance” by empowering women from poor backgrounds to be visionary leaders and community transformation specialists at the new African Rural University which is launching in Kagadi, Uganda this September. These young women will be using many of the customer-led innovation techniques that I’ve been writing about—envisioning (and helping others in the community envision) their ideal outcomes, and showing them how to harness their own creativity to realize their dreams. Helping each family and each community create its own vision and helping them achieve results through integrated rural development (agriculture, social justice, nutrition, health, entrepreneurship, micro-finance, etc.) is a grassroots-developed recipe that has been generating great results for 20 years in this area of rural Uganda.

By contrast, imagine Larry Ellison’s chagrin when the lead story on the front page of the Financial Times on June 21st reads “Harvard Left in the Lurch over Ellison Donation.” The story explains that while Larry Ellison promised a $115 million donation to Harvard University in March 2005, he still hasn’t come through. “The planned Ellison Institute which was to study and disseminate ways to assess health policies around the world, would have marked a big increase in philanthropic support by Mr. Ellison, estimated by Forbes to be the world’s 15th richest man with $16 billion in net assets.”

Of course there are complications.  The “charitable donation” is part of a law suit settlement that hasn’t yet been finalized. Larry may not want to give this money before the settlement terms are set, because it might not count and he’d have to give more money to some other cause. But the obvious disparity between Bill Gates’ commitment to making a difference and Larry’s maneuvers which have caused Harvard to delay the hiring of twenty researchers, to renege on the appointments of five top academics, and to fire three staff people is certainly brand-damaging for Larry and for Oracle.

To be fair, I’m sure that Larry Ellison has a healthy set of causes to which he’s personally committed and generous. It’s too bad that this particular promise-turned-sour is damaging the Ellison/Oracle brand. In the ongoing Ellison/Gates one-upmanship game, Bill Gates scored big this week!

HOW QUICKLY AND EASILY CAN YOU AND YOUR EMPLOYEES FIND THE INFORMATION YOU NEED TO DO YOUR JOBS?

You can't provide a great customer experience if you aren't providing a great experience within your own company. The ability to find the most accurate, up-to-date information is critical to the success of any business. How much time do you spend searching through your company's intranet, your company's product information, your company's marketing information, your own project files, email folders for the latest policies, pricing, product launch information, employee benefits information, current and planned campaigns, executive slide decks, and so on? How long does it take you to find what you need? How confident are you that you have the right and most current information?

Enterprise search is broken in many companies, possibly in yours. That's because the people who evaluate and select the search and navigation technology that's used internally--on intranets and within and across enterprise applications--have so many different stakeholders to optimize for. HR professionals need to search for different things than do marketing managers. In order to optimize for everyone, you really need to focus on the different types of information seekers you have and the audiences they each serve. You also need to support the people who are responsible for making all the different information collections easy to navigate.

BEST PRACTICES FROM OFFICE SUPPLIES RETAILER, STAPLES

Something clicked for me when I finished the Staples case study for my book, "Outside Innovation." What snapped into place for me was a conceptual framework for thinking about how and when to differentiate types of “Voice of the Customer” input: operational customer data, customer surveys, ethnographic research, customer personas, customer validation of personas, customer focus groups, customer communities, customer co-design, business process redesign of customer-impacting initiatives, customer usability testing, and so on.

Staples used the following types of customer input and research in re-energizing its brand and gaining mindshare, marketshare, and increased profitability:

* Customer surveys

* Customer call drivers

* Watched customers’ behavior in the stores

* Observed customers’ behavior in their offices

* Interviewed customers

WHERE DO SEARCH AND FINDABILITY FIT IN YOUR BUSINESS STRATEGY?

According to the survey we ran in May 2006, very few companies are taking search seriously enough. Yet search has become the primary way that prospects, customers, partners and employees interact with information when they need to get something done. We all care about the quality of the search experience when we’re trying to accomplish a task. But we don’t prioritize our company’s resources to match our own customer experience priorities.

There’s a big upside in improving findability for product information. Online retailers report that when they improve the findability and completeness of their product information, their conversion rates and shopping basket sizes increase 300 percent on average! Yet our survey revealed that only 12 percent of respondents felt that their companies’ product search capabilities were excellent, and a whopping 25 percent felt that the ecommerce search experience on their sites was poor or hopeless.

There are also huge savings to be had in improving findability for customer support--for both business and technical issues that customers have. When customers can find the answers they need and can resolve their own issues, the cost savings to the business are enormous. Our findability consultant, Sue Aldrich, reports that “good online customer service can handle up to 90 percent of customer questions. Implementing premium search can immediately boost call deflection, cutting the number of calls in half.” Yet 55 percent of our respondents assessed their own companies’ customer support search as poor or hopeless.

INNOVATIONS IN EDUCATION

Students and Faculty Co-Design Their Engineering Education at Olin College

I was delighted to read a story in the Boston Globe about the fact that the first class graduating from Olin College of Engineering actually co-designed its own college experience and curriculum. The first freshman class, who entered the brand new college-in-formation in 2001 spent a huge amount of their time designing courses and designing the college experience they wanted to have, as well as studying and learning. The result is a very student-centered experience, where faculty and students sit together at lunch, play together, and invent together. Faculty are not tenured. They are risk takers. Many of them are leaders in their fields.

The first cohort of engineering students and their faculty agreed--they wanted to apply learning, in context. So, the students designed an educational experience that combines “rigorous science and engineering fundamentals, entrepreneurship, and the liberal arts. There is a deep commitment at all levels to active learning and interdisciplinary courses built around hands-on projects. At Olin, learning and doing go together from the start. This real-world approach culminates in SCOPE (Senior Consulting Program for Engineering), a significant, year-long engineering project for an actual client.”

I love this approach to revamping education. Who says that customers don’t know what they want and need! Don’t tell that to the graduating class of Olin!

A REPORT ON WHAT OUR LEAD CUSTOMERS (PATTY’S VISIONARIES) CARE ABOUT

Our lead customer-centric executives met this month to compare notes. We offer a high-level synopsis of our two days of intense discussions. Many of you who use (or are in the market for) solutions to improve your customers’ experience in doing business with you across channels and lifecycle stages have told us that you appreciate our quarterly updates on market trends. This week, we provide Mitch Kramer’s quarterly summary of the action in this important market space.

How Do You Spot Your Lead Customers?

One of the things we’ve learned from more than 15 years of facilitating and leading customer co-design sessions is that there are definitely some customers who provide more usable and actionable insights than others. There are some customers who will naturally push the envelope and others who have difficulty seeing beyond their micro-tasks. The former are your lead customers. The latter are your laggards. You need to build a core competency in identifying and recruiting lead customers to help you co-design your business.