Outside Innovation: Roles and Responsibilities for Managing Your Customer Communities

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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.

April 23, 2008

Roles and Responsibilities for Managing Your Customer Communities

Communities are hot! Everyone is talking about them. Every company says it wants one—or to grow the one (or more) already in place. But, as Matthew Lees points out in his report this week, creating, deploying, and managing online customer communities is a nascent science. To help you truly prepare for launching or running successful online communities, he provides advice on the responsibilities, skill sets, and roles needed to make your communities a valuable part of your overall business. After reading Matthew’s report, think about whether your organization has the right people in place to launch itself into the community world!

Posted by Patty Seybold on April 23, 2008 in Business Models, Community, Customer Communities, Customer Experience, Customer Innovation, Customer Roles in Innovation, Customer-Centricity, Customer-contributed content, Innovation, Outside Innovation, Social Networking | 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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April 23, 2008

Roles and Responsibilities for Managing Your Customer Communities

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