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  • What is Outside Innovation?
    It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services. The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes. The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.

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    Observations

    • LEAD USERS
      Eric von Hippel coined the term "lead users" to describe a group of both customers and non-customers who are passionate about getting certain things accomplished. They may not know or care about the products or services you offer. But they do care about their project or need. Lead users have already explored innovative ways to get things done. They're usually willing to share their approaches with others.
    • LEAD CUSTOMERS
      I use the term "lead customers" to describe the small percentage of your current customers who are truly innovative. These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about.
    • LEAD CUSTOMERS AND LEAD USERS
      We’ve spent the last 25 years identifying, interviewing, selecting, and grouping customers together to participate in our Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions. Over the years, we’ve learned how to identify the people who will contribute the most to a customer co-design session. These are the same kinds of people you should be recruiting when you set out to harness customer-led innovation.
    • HOW DO YOU WIN IN INNOVATION?
      You no longer win by having the smartest engineers and scientists; you win by having the smartest customers!
    • CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN
      In more than 25 years of business strategy consulting, we’ve found that customer co-design is a woefully under-used capability.
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    « Julie Fleischer's Reading List | Main | GLOBAL APPLICATIONS OF CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN: EMPOWERING VILLAGERS IN RURAL AFRICA »

    February 26, 2007

    Comments

    Graham Hill

    Patty

    I clicked through to Jones' blog expecting great things. I was very disappointed to find that the dozens of Profit Forms he quotes on the blog are almost entirely devoid of content - the forms themself aren't described, the basis of their profitability isn't described, the basis of their competitiveness isn't described, even how the quoted examples fit with the forms is not described! The Business School in a Box part of the blog is equally devoid of content!

    I am not sure that the approach Jones has taken is actually a step forward. It is one thing to come up with a list of 'profit forms', but it is another entirely to understand in detail how successful businesses compete to deliver superior outcomes for customers, with the resources available to them and their partners, in a way that generates acceptable value for all parties.

    Rather than Jones' blog, I would direct readers to Guy Kawasaki's excellent 'How to Change the World' blog (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/) in particular, his now famous '10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint' post (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html)that shows how to structure an outline business plan.

    As in many worthwhile things in life, the devil is in the detail.

    Graham Hill
    Independent CRM Consultant
    Interim CRM Manager

    The comments to this entry are closed.

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