Outside Innovation

What Low-Cost Innovation Techniques Should You Be Using RIGHT NOW??

A slowing economy is an ideal time to be focusing on your next generation products, services, business processes, and business models. Yet most organizations are so busy trying to cut costs and to convince cash-strapped customers to buy that they neglect to feed their innovation engine during tough times.

Here’s my top-five list of low-cost approaches to get the “outside innovation” creative juices rolling and to ensure that you take rapid action on the best ideas and opportunities:

1. Add a Customer-Led Innovation Track to Your Planned Customer Conferences and Users’ Group Meetings. Inject a customer co-design track into each of your planned conferences this year. Instead of providing your own experts’ content, have your customers nominate the areas in which they’d like to see improvements and/or breakthroughs. Make sure you include at least four categories of co-design opportunities:

• New solutions to difficult problems that customers need

• Enhancements to existing products or services

• New business models

• Redesigned business processes that make it easier for them to get things done in interacting with your firm and/or your channel partners

Run these sessions as true customer co-design events: partner passionate, insightful customers with your subject matter experts. Screen and interview customers who want to participate ahead of time to ensure they’ll have great ideas. Co-design, don’t just talk. Make sure to include planned follow up: within 24 hours, one month and 90 days at a minimum. For information on how we can help you with your customer co-design.

What Low-Cost Customer Experience Improvements Should You Be Making RIGHT NOW?

A slowing economy is an ideal time to be focusing on making it easy for your customers and prospects to do business with you and on making it easy for your customers to reach their goals. Yet most organizations are so busy trying to cut costs and to convince cash-strapped customers to buy that they neglect investing in the most customer-critical things. Some of the things your customers need to make their lives easier may be low-hanging fruit that has been ignored.

I remember talking to a client in the customer support group at Cisco during the last big tech downturn. She was happy to report that as times got tough, the company had stopped throwing more people into customer support, and turned its attention, instead, to empowering customers and customer-service agents with better information and better tools—the things that she had been advocating. Cisco also changed the compensation structure for customer service agents at the time, to reward them for solving tough problems and turning those solutions into self-service wizards, rather than rewarding customer service personnel on the number of cases they resolved per day. Downturns bring opportunities. Make sure you’re taking advantage of yours!

So here’s my top 5 list of customer experience tactics you should be doing right now. The first three are Web-related because, for most of us, the Web is our customers’ first port of call:

1. Improve the Findability and Quality of Information on Your Web Site(s). This is a continuous improvement project. It starts with analytics. What search terms are people using? What navigation paths are they taking? What results are they getting? How accurate and up-to-date are those results?

Are customers seeing what they need to see in order to buy something and/or to solve a problem? If you don’t have a fancy tool to analyze what people are doing on your Web site, use the free tools from Google Analytics.

What Knowledge Do Your Customers Want and Need to Create?

Perhaps doctors, scientists, engineers, and/or household finance managers may not be representative of your customers. But their emerging behavior IS a pattern that is likely to show up in your industry among your most insightful and passionate customers. So ask yourself these questions:

1. What classifications, rules, relationships, practices, or learnings do your customers implicitly or explicitly use? Is it easy for customers to capture and codify these for their own use and for the potential benefit of others inside or outside their organization?

2. Do you offer products or services that make it easy for customers to capture the distinctions that are important to their context and practice? If not, should you?

3. What relationships or behaviors can you make it easier for customers to identify as a byproduct of using your tools or interacting with your products or services?

(Lead) Customers Codify & Create Knowledge

There’s an emerging trend that’s worth calling your attention to and amplifying. It’s when customers with specialized knowledge, passionate interests, and/or unique access to “ground truth” information capture and codify it in order to share it with their colleagues. I’ve noticed lead customers capturing, codifying, and sharing knowledge in a variety of disciplines recently:

• Doctors codify algorithms for drug dosages.

• Scientists and engineers capture, encode, and model data feeds from the environment.

• Design engineers capture and maintain company-specific practices and manufacturing machine-specific tolerances.

• Consumers who care about where their money is going categorize and monitor their cash flow.

Doctors Codify Context-Specific Formulations. One of the best stories I’ve heard recently was told to me by Dr. Nat Sims from Mass General Hospital. It was also referenced in a story on lead user innovation in the New York Times. Nat is a cardiac anesthesiologist. He explained that formulating and administering exactly the right combinations of today’s sophisticated drugs has become increasingly complex. Doctors make judgment calls in real time in the operating room. Well-trained and knowledgeable professionals follow those instructions and add their expertise to ensure safe and appropriate drug administration. Every group of specialist practitioners develops a set of best practices for mixing drugs for different types of patients in different circumstances. This becomes part of the implicit knowledgebase of the specialists in each hospital’s practice. As Nat and his colleagues invented a much more automated drug formulation and delivery system, they realized that the best people to create and maintain the algorithms for drug administration were the expert practitioners themselves. Nat’s contribution as a lead user in the invention of the system is noteworthy. But equally impressive was the organizational accomplishment of convincing a group of busy doctors, nurses, and pharmacists to codify and maintain their applied expertise in a set of algorithms and after action reviews. I asked Nat whether these drug formulations were being shared across medical institutions yet. He is hopeful that cross-organizational knowledge sharing will be a logical next step in the evolution.

Are You Empowering Your Customers to Codify Their Knowledge and Share It with Others?

Customers Contribute Perspectives

Much ado has been made about user-generated content (UGC). Yet it’s often difficult to do well. There are several U.S. news organizations that have opened up blogs to reader comments and then closed them back down again due to the vituperative comments they attracted. Other news brands have been more successful in integrating readers’ perspectives and contributions. We’ve written about CNN’s I-Report, commented on MSNBC’s more recent efforts, and, two years ago, chronicled some of the BBC’s initiatives in Outside Innovation and in a longer case study.

 BBC is very aggressive in promoting user-generated content. Just about every third story on their early morning broadcast includes the now familiar mantra, “let us know your thoughts on ‘Have Your Say’ at bbc.co.uk.” At the end of each segment, they read some of the more insightful comments about the day’s stories. YouTube is another great tool for user-generated content. Today’s BBC World morning news featured a story about an activist campaign that Saudi Arabian women are mounting by uploading YouTube videos of women driving cars in Saudi Arabia —part of a campaign to lobby the government to lift the ban on women drivers.

Build Customer-Centric Ecosystems to Support Customers’ Goals

I enjoyed a recent meeting with a long-time client Colin Campbell, who is a talented entrepreneur (Upskill.co.nz) and farmer from New Zealand (sheep and Gala apples). He pointed out that the approach he has used in both his farming and his training businesses (that he claims he learned from me) has been to put the customer (student or farmer) at the center of an ecosystem of supporting stakeholders and partners.

In Colin’s case, he does this with his own home-grown customer-centric portal that is based around the tasks, goals, and timeline that each person needs to accomplish. Both students (in his case, people who are training for new jobs or better jobs) and farmers (like himself and others in his community) start from their end-goal. What job do I want to have? When do I want my crops or animals on the market?

Customers work backward from there, coming up with a game plan for how they plan to achieve that goal with all of the milestones along the way. Surrounding the students is an ecosystem of courses, teachers, tutors, employers, prospective employers, and government agencies all playing their respective parts in helping these students be successful. Surrounding the farmer is an analogous ecosystem of seed, fertilizer, and supplies manufacturers and distributors, best practices, weather forecasts, market and commodities data, agricultural research, extension services, and other farmers sharing local tips and tricks. In both cases, there are date-oriented milestones to be met, pre-requisites and tasks to be accomplished.

Perhaps your customers have a timeline-oriented set of tasks they perform over and over again. Have you thought of providing them with the tools they need to manage their own projects and to do lists and linking it to an ecosystem of peer, expert, and partner support?

Accelerate Your Innovation Metabolism through Partner-Practitioner-Subject Matter Expert-Cross-Industry Ecosystems

In a May 15th, blog post, "Optical communications goes nano—HP announces practical interconnect tech (and an ecosystem for it to grow in)," Scott Jordan also extolled HP’s breakthroughs in silicon photonics through nanoimprint lithography. The goal is to reduce the cost and increase the speed of data transfer through the convergence of nanotechnology and optics. Scott quotes Colin Johnson’s story in EETimes:

“Using silicon photonics to connect blades, boards, chips and eventually cores on the same chip has become a strategic goal for Hewlett Packard... By harnessing its expertise in nanoimprint lithography to fashion low-cost, high-speed silicon photonic devices, HP said it hopes to seed the fledgling community of optical interconnect component makers. Rather than doing it all, HP is seeking partners with other silicon photonic pioneers in hopes of developing its first optical interconnect technology in products by 2009.”

But what really excited Scott was the fact that HP convened a gathering of the smartest people they knew and invited others around the world to join in an open innovation ecosystem around this new technology. Scott participates in National Instruments’ ecosystem of scientists and engineers, so he knows how effective these customer/partner/expert ecosystems are in advancing the application of new technologies to tackle new problem spaces and to advance the state of the art. What’s particularly important in designing these kinds of ecosystems is to ensure that you have vibrant participation from experts in many different disciplines. It’s often the cross-disciplinary or cross-industry idea transfers that yield the most momentum.

Celebrating Freedom from Clumsy Computing (Using Sunscreen!)

One of our pioneers, Scott Jordan, a nano-technologist, has been sending pointers to breakthrough developments in parallel analog computing. Scott has been blogging about HP’s Information and Quantum Systems Lab’s announcement of Memristor.

The HP Lab’s research team, led by HP Senior Fellow R. Stanley Williams,

“has developed a new switching technology by building a nanoscale memristor switch—at 50 nanometers by 50 nanometers, it is the world's smallest—that contained a layer of titanium dioxide (a chemical commonly used in both sunscreen and white paint) between two nanowires….Scientist Jianhua Yang found that by subtly manipulating the distribution of the oxygen atoms in this layer, he could control how the device functioned. Although other labs have demonstrated switching using similar materials, none have achieved this level of control over the switches.”^[1]

What are the implications of this breakthrough?

1. Faster, cheaper, nonvolatile RAM—low energy-consuming, inexpensive memory—I get excited thinking about the existing “thumb drives,” which are already incredibly popular in the third world, and low-cost computers that can be powered by solar energy.

2. Analog parallel computers—low-cost, low-energy-consuming computers that are much better suited to parallel processing the massive streams of real-time data feeds that are required to analyze, model, and diagnose many of our planet’s toughest problems—like global warming. Instead of (or in addition to) supercomputers in the cloud, memristive technologies could be deployed in distributed and embedded systems. These memristors can be turned into “integrated circuits that remember information, consume far less power than existing devices, and may someday learn from past behavior.”^[2]

As Scott Jordan points out:

“Memristors' capability is not limited to storing 1's and 0's. That would be so 21st century. No, memristors can store values in-between. They are analog devices, and they will facilitate parallel analog computers. Those are common enough: you have one between your ears.”^[3]

*FOOTNOTES*
1) Jamie Beckett, June 2008, http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2008/apr-jun/engineering_memristor.html

2) Ibid

3) Scott Jordan, CarpeNano.com