Outside Innovation

Karmaloop Featured in Business Week!

I was pleased to see Greg Selkoe's Karmaloop featured in the cover story of Business Week's Small Biz edition in December. Amy Barrett was interested enough in my Karmaloop case study to spend some time with Greg and to feature Karmaloop in her article entitled  True Believers: "Passionate customers can transform your company. Here's how to make them your secret weapon."

There are a couple of great pictures of Greg Selkoe in action in this issue of Business Week!

Amy mentions a number of other interesting examples in her story, including software firm TechSmith,  educational gaming firm Tabula Digita , and sports apparel retailer On the Run--each of which have nurtured vibrant customer communities.

Why Napkin Drawings are Better than Finished Demos

Kathy Sierra has a great post on Creating Passionate Users, entitled Don't Make the Demo Look Done!

Her topic is ostensibly the perils of showing demos of software with polished user interfaces. There are two significant downsides that she describes:

1. People/customers think that the software is close to complete (when it's really only a prototype).
2. People/customers focus on making incremental suggestions for improvement, like changing the fonts or the wording of a prompt, or the location of a button, instead of on the BIG PICTURE.

Her recommendation is to mirror the "doneness" of the software or Web site (or product) with the degree of professional finish. For example, if you are still in concept design mode, you should show scribbles on paper napkins. If you are still thinking thru the use case, you should show a rough story board, and so on.

Here's a great illustration from Kathy's post:

The more "done" something appears, the more narrow and incremental the feedback

In her explanation, Kathy comments:

"My point is: all you'll get is tree-tweaks when you show something finished-looking, so if you want big picture, make it fuzzy!"

Happy New Year!

Red Spears, originally uploaded by kenny42952.

 

Traditional vs. Open Innovation « NextUp

Thanks to Doug Meacham in his "Next Up" blog for his mention of Outside Innovation  Traditional vs. Open Innovation < Next Up. 
 

Although he has just started reading the book, Doug was nice enough to say:

"Open innovation is one of the key trends in the world of business right now, and this book looks like a terrific guide to what it is and how to implement it in your company.  This concept goes way beyond creating products that meet customer’s needs.  Embracing the customer as a partner is a way to transform and elevate your brand.  As competition increases and the ability to differentiate yourself decreases, are you asking your customers to help define your brand’s experience???"

Here, here!

ARE YOU LEVERAGING CUSTOMER-GENERATED CONTENT?

As we move towards the close of 2006, you should be asking yourself "How can we take better advantage of user-generated content in 2007?" I recommend that you convene a brainstorming session before the holidays to consider this topic, let ideas percolate over the holiday period, and come back to work in January 2007 with at least one pilot project to implement in the first quarter. To get your creative juices flowing, here are a few pointers as to what others are doing.

Letting Your Customers Support Each Other

Many customer support and e-business executives are scratching their heads over this question: what’s the best way to integrate online customer forums into our formal customer support activities?
We love the fact that customers are ready and willing to share their knowledge and their experiences, to lend helping hands to one another. But we worry about the fact that their advice may be misleading, causing more harm than good.

In our formal customer support processes, we’ve designed well-thought-out escalation paths. Customers should be able to navigate or search quickly to the problem or issue they’re having, find the answer and resolve the problem themselves, and diagnose or troubleshoot, if necessary. They should only need to consult our support professionals if the customers can’t resolve their issues on their own. This self-help approach is not only the most cost-effective one; it has also proven to be the most satisfying to the majority of customers.

MIGRATING FROM LEAD USERS TO MAINSTREAM CUSTOMERS

I recently met with Rod Johnson, the CEO of Interface21 and the original creator of what has come to be the highly popular Spring Framework for enterprise Java application development.

Rod was on his way to his now-annual Users’ Conference, The Spring Experience 2006, which is being held in Hollywood, Florida starting today, December 7th. This year, more than 400 developers and architects from more than 20 countries convened for three days of 60 technical sessions. These customers (developers and IT architects who use the Spring framework as applications infrastructure for their applications) are, for the most part, developers of large-scale enterprise and commercial applications in many of the world’s biggest firms.

Great News about Grassroots Innovation from Young Women in Uganda

I had a great personal experience with technology that works last week. My North American colleagues and I were gearing up to host small, personal fund-raising events in our homes in Maine, Toronto, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts last weekend. We are bringing the good news that a group of 35 motivated young African women are just completing their first semester of work in the ground-breaking African Rural University (ARU). (I am a member of the University Council). We wanted to include video interviews with these young women. We only had three days to get the videos made, edited, and uploaded to the Web.

The good news is that with the ARU’s satellite-based Internet connection and ftp, we were able to upload, edit, and pass these clips back and forth until everyone was happy. The amazing thing for all concerned was how easy it was to do. Considering that the university campus is located in an area of subsistence farmers, mud huts, no plumbing, no electricity and with a plethora of tropical diseases, infant mortality and marginal literacy, this small exercise was a great example of the miracles that have been wrought by this dedicated group of Ugandans who have a vision of what life in rural communities can be. You can view the short video here (the click on the “watch the video link” in the picture caption).

Seymour Papert is Critically Injured!

I was dismayed to see this article in today's Boston Globe,  MIT Scientist listed as Critical after Brain Surgery in Hanoi. Seymour Papert was run into by a speeding motorbike as he crossed the street in Hanoi and underwent brain surgery last night. My thoughts and best wishes for a miraculous recovery are with Seymour and his family.

Seymour is the father of customer-led innovation in early childhood education. He is a pioneer in applied Artificial Intelligence. Among other accomplishments, Dr. Papert and his team of grad students at MIT invented the LOGO programming language for kids to use and the first child-powered robots--the forerunners of the LEGO Mindstorms product.

Our prayers are with Seymour and his family!

IS MICROSOFT READY FOR MICROSOFT’S “NEW DAY?”

You have to admire the orchestration and execution of Microsoft’s official launch of Windows Vista, 2007 Microsoft Office, and Exchange Server 2007 on November 30, 2006. Of course you can’t actually download and use the software yet--that comes at the end of January. But, I’m sure that many of you have participated in the beta testing program and are engaged in the many IT deployment/readiness activities Microsoft has orchestrated. It’s the best orchestrated product launch I’ve ever witnessed and the largest in Microsoft’s history.

Focused on a Single Customer Scenario: Migration

Not surprisingly, with 850 million computers running Windows and 450 million MS Office users around the world, Microsoft is fanatically focused on ease of migration--for end users and IT staff alike. The good news is that this product launch is the first one in my recollection that Microsoft has actually optimized and designed to support the Customer Scenario: “I want to migrate to this next-generation O/S to get my work done better.” So, Microsoft has identified customers’ moments of truth around migration and has worked hard to address them.