What roles are your customers playing in shaping your business?

This week as “Outside Innovation” finally hits the bookstores in the United States (as far as I know nobody has bought the rights for international distribution from Harper Collins--Random House did a much better job of getting international distribution and translations with my last two books!), we are publishing the first in what will be a series of “Customer Innovation Guides”--tools you can use to see where your organization (or your team or your department) stacks up on the customer innovation maturity curve.

One thing I noticed in researching the book was that the most innovative companies and the ones that are most customer-adaptive have customers playing active roles in many different parts of their business. Take Mozilla for example. As I described in my article about Mozilla’s evolution, customers play all the roles at Mozilla--they write code (lead users, contributors), they debug code (consultants), they make suggestions about next-gen features (consultants), they market the products (promoters), and they support the products (guides). As Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s Chief Lizard Wrangler, said at our last Visionaries’ meeting, somewhat puzzled by our discussions about porous organizational boundaries, “there’s no inside and no outside at Mozilla.”

That’s a true outside innovation organization!

Comments

[Patty Seybold]

John,
I'm honored that you stopped by! Right--there are lots of different kinds of customer engagement and not all are right for each client.

For example, if your clients are NIH folks when it comes to new product development, they may be much more open-minded when it comes to customer co-creation of product positioning and guerrilla marketing.

On the other hand, you may have clients who are quite willing to be "porous" in co-designing new services and products by working directly with end-customers and/or by co-opting consumers' good ideas!

Thanks for the pointer (on your blog) to Pete Blackshaw's Engagement by Engagement Blog!

Patty

[Jonathan Narducci]

The first Guide is an innovation in itself. The concept of "Guides" is particularly useful and, I believe, rarely used. The evaluation criteria starts the thinking process necessary to get company folks out of their "normal" customer relationship activities and into a "change" mindset. Good job.

[John Bell]

We are wrestling with where each of our clients reside on teh "engagement" scale - that is to what level are the willing and best suited to go in terms of engaging their customers - co-creation being a somewhat advanced state (and not right for everyone). I like your observation that the most innovative companies "have customers playing active roles in many different parts of their business." Too often we are trying to find that 'one' program that will thrust a client into this practice and it really must be more organic and more pervasive.

I can't wait for the book.

[Patty Seybold]

Hi Lincoln,
You're right, working closely with customers in partnership will certainly help you drive your business priorities from the outside in. I'm curious to know how many of these roles your customers actually play:

Lead customers
Contributors
Consultants
Guides
Promoters

If you have time, download my questionnaire and let me know what you discover!

My bet is that you've probably got at least 4 out of these 5 roles covered..

Patty

[Lincoln Torcelli]

"Partnership" is the word which best describes customers shaping our business.
I manage 400 people in my business unit, security business(certainly a booming industry)and we work every day with our clients to get the job done in a win-win relationship.