Outside Innovation: Customer Co-Design In Action

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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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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.

May 13, 2007

Customer Co-Design In Action

Customers love participating in these co-design sessions! For one thing, they feel REALLY listened to. They aren't just talking to a one-way mirror, they're talking to executives who are truly interested in understanding deeply what they're trying to accomplish. Then they get an opportunity to create a composite persona that represents their common context and outcomes. Then they get the fun of thinking out of the box with their peers--brainstorming brand new ways of achieving their outcomes. Finally, they get the satisfaction of working side by side with the subject matter experts in the company to co-create more streamlined processes, as well as new offerings and services that will make it easy for the customers to achieve their goals.

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Posted by Patty Seybold on May 13, 2007 in Customer Co-Design | Permalink

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Outside Innovation

New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold

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May 13, 2007

Customer Co-Design In Action

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