Outside Innovation: Enterprise Mash Ups and SOA

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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.

February 06, 2008

Enterprise Mash Ups and SOA

As I plunged back into the world of Web 2.0, mash ups, and gadgets, I noticed that there's now a huge buzz around "enterprise mash ups" and a convergence between the worlds of Service-Oriented Architectures and Ajax/Executable Web/Mash Up promulgators. This epiphany has been too long in coming. The handwriting has been on the wall for a while. And pioneering lead users have been combining Web Services with end-user-friendly gadgets, using RSS and event-based syndication (publish and subscribe) for several years.

As usual, the hype around Enterprise Mash Ups will no doubt be extreme. It's already being pushed as the next nirvana for the IT-run around crowd. Use Web-based tools to snap together services. Leverage all the great utility services that are already out there (Google Maps, Amazon S3, Eventful, Flickr, YouTube... pick your favorite platforms and tools). You don't have to wait for your IT department to wrap your back-end application functionality into real Web Services, you can "cheat" by extracting data in the form of reports and turning them into RSS feeds, which you can mash up with graphical user interfaces and tools. This is the general spin. And there are now dozens of "roll your own" enterprise mash up platforms and toolkits springing up to absorb Venture Capital dollars and vie for our attention.

This convergence is a good thing. It's way overdue. It will be overhyped. But there are ways to take advantage of this trend without going off the deep end. I look forward to helping you chart your path!

Posted by Patty Seybold on February 06, 2008 in Mash Up, SOA | Permalink

Comments

Carl,
I apologize.. I currently have comments and posts enabled for RSS.. I'll switch back to posts only....

I'm also thinking that this may be happening when I go back and edit previously posted material, e.g. adding graphics... My apologies.. We'll try to be more careful!!!

Patty

Posted by: Patty Seybold | February 14, 2008 at 06:41 AM

On a totally unrelated topic... I subscribe to this via an RSS feed. Every time you post a new article, it re-downloads the past ten or so postings, marking them as unread. I don't see this behavior with any of my other RSS feeds.

Anybody else seeing that?

Posted by: Carl | February 07, 2008 at 03:47 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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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February 06, 2008

Enterprise Mash Ups and SOA

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