Outside Innovation

What's the Winning Formula for Unleashing Customer Innovation?

In order to foster Outside Innovation, there are three key ingredients:

1. Customers/users who are passionate about something they're trying to accomplish or something they want.
2. A deep understanding and appreciation by those customers/users of their current reality: their context, their situation, their constraints, how things are currently done
3. A clear vision by those customers/users of their ideal outcome: what it would be, how it would feel, how they would feel having achieved it, and all of their conditions of satisfaction that would need to be met.

Crowdsourcing, Customer-Contributed Content or Lead Customer Innovation

Jessi Hempel's article Crowdsourcing: Milk the Masses for Inspiration, in Business Week's Innovation Supplement this week, was one of the few mentions of customer-led innovation in this entire 40-page survey of trends in innovation. (It's interesting that BW devotes so much ink to innovative design and to product innovation, and so little ink to customer-led innovation.)

Jessi referenced consumers designing ads on Current TV ("Make the Ads You Want to Watch!),

customers contributing designs at John Fluevog Boots and Shoes open source footwear site,

and scientists competing to solve thorny problems at InnoCentive. 

Thank you, Jessi, for writing about the important topic of user-led innovation!

"Crowdsourcing" was also the topic of an earlier BW article Crowdsourcing: Consumers as Creators by Paul Boutin, in which Paul referencing the  MIT Sloan Management Review article by Frank Piller and Susumu Ogawa that I mentioned last December. This article has engendered a modicum of whining on the part of readers who feel that designers/inventors should be paid handsomely for their contributions, not "taken advantage of." It's important to point out that the people who choose to contribute their time, creativity and ideas to a contest or a challenge, typically do it, not so much for the money, but for the satisfaction of seeing their ideas realized. And, one colleague said recently, "if you don't want to give your IP away, then don't do it!"

Best Practices/Take Aways from MIT User Innovation Lab Forum

I was privileged to attend Professor Eric von Hippel’s MIT Innovation Lab Meeting, which was hosted on the MIT campus on September 7th and 8th. Many of the participants were corporate sponsors of the User-Centered Innovation research that takes place at the MIT Sloan School under Eric’s oversight. The participants spanned industries--automotive, consumer packaged goods, education, government, healthcare, high tech, media/publishing, not-for-profits, and telecoms, and also included academics and legal experts. The presenters were all practitioners--people who are engaged in lead user innovation in their organizations.

THE OUTSIDE INNOVATION IMPERATIVE

Excerpted (with permission) from the Introduction to Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design the Future of your Business by Patricia B.Seybold, Published 2006 by Collins:

Customers’ renegade behavior challenges your business models and endangers your intellectual property. Customers’ demanding expectations for customized products, wonderful experiences, and high service levels drain your resources. Customers’ insistence on open access is exposing your industry’s policies and challenging your inflexible business processes.

This customer-led outside innovation movement is inevitable. It’s scary. It’s exciting. And, it’s dangerous to your business if you’re not prepared.

What can you do to channel this customer energy into a positive direction—one that will power your business rather than sink it?

GOOGLE: THE CAMEL’S NOSE IN BUSINESS SOFTWARE?

Our search and findability guru, Sue Aldrich, characterized Google’s latest enterprise software additions as the camel’s nose strategy. First, Google offered search appliances for the enterprise and the desktop to make it easy for employees to “Google” the information within their companies the way they use Google to find external resources. Then, Google offered consumer email, which many business people quickly adopted as an alternative personal email service. Now, Google is providing “Google Apps for Your Domain” which offers good-quality email with integrated calendaring, chat, VOIP and other features that will appeal to small businesses and to end users within large enterprises as well. Google Earth for the enterprise is picking up traction as more and more companies use the app for strategic applications from construction to oil exploration to logistics to environmental applications.