For many of our corporate visionaries--representing both large and small companies--our conversation last week puzzled over several key issues:
- If customers want to strut their stuff, help each other and solve each others’ problems, how tightly should those customer communities be integrated into our more carefully structured customer support knowledgebases and resolution flows? Does it make a difference if we’re charging for support? Will customers pay for support if some of it is provided by other customers?
- If customers promote our brand and contribute to our marketing and create our collateral, how do we ensure that they capture the essence of our brand image and don’t dilute it or take it in the “wrong” direction?
- If customers are creating their own solutions and accomplishing their own results using our resources and tools, how much of their accomplishments are they willing and even eager to share? If we let them see how they’re doing compared to others, is that welcome or invasive?
Web 2.0 Enablement For Entrepreneurs And Intrapreneurs
Our customer-centric Visionaries are becoming entrepreneurs again! Not only do we have a few CEOs of innovative young companies as members, but several of our Visionaries who work or worked in larger enterprises are starting up new business ventures as hobbies and passions. The economic climate has changed completely for start-up e-ventures. You no longer need venture capital money to fund your startup. You can bootstrap it by using open source software, free or very cheap utility services (like Amazon’s S3 server farms for massive online storage, and Google video for free video servers, and Skype and Vonage, etc.). Co-creators will volunteer, contributing labor and IP for future gain, and there are plenty of monetization strategies, from generating ad revenues, to providing premium services for a fee, to using a subscription or pay-per-use models.
What people within larger companies are realizing is that much of what needs to get done and can’t get done within their corporate bureaucracies, can easily get done in the relatively friction-free market of e-entrepreneurship. If I can bootstrap my own Web-enabled company in my basement in 90 days, why does it take millions of dollars and hundreds of people to get an equivalent project done in my corporate world? That’s nuts!
We all know the reasons why we can’t make rapid, incremental progress in our large organizations--we have compliance regulations, legal issues, security issues, installed base issues, business strategy concerns, and lots of excuses of the “we’ve-tried-that-before-it-won’t-work” variety. We also have too many fingers in the pot.
Yet we can all witness and experience the nimble, customer-centric and customer-engaged activities in the e-world all around us. The disconnect between what we can do internally in our large organizations and what we can do in the e-world, in our basements, and in our garages is too great. We need a safety valve to bring this customer-centric entrepreneurship into our larger organizations. That’s the role we see for customer-centric innovation labs. Set one up in your shop today!
To help you in your efforts to empower customers, we offer another installment of our “Customer Innovation Guide: Provide Customers with Tools to Reach Their Desired Outcomes.” What tools do you currently provide to your customers? What tools should you be providing?
Web 2.0 Bundles for Small and Medium Businesses
We’ve already written about “Google Applications for the Enterprise” as a promising development for enterprise business users who want to enable inter-organizational project teams and for small businesses. (At the Web 2.0 Summit, according to blogger, Valleywag, Google CEO Eric Schmidt proclaimed, “We don't call it an office suite. It's not an office suite." In other words: "We're NOT competing with Microsoft, we're NOT competing with Microsoft...No we’re not taking on Microsoft”.
This week, Intel announced a similar bundle, called Suite Two. It’s a combination package of software tools from SixApart, Socialtext, Newsgator, and Simplefeed to create blogs, wikis, social networking applications, and to aggregate and share interesting content and news. Intel is bundling up these applications, partnering with Kim Polese’s Spikesource to support and sell the applications. Intel will be offering Suite Two to Intel resellers along with hardware through its Channel Marketplace.
Comments