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.
2. Engage Your Customer Advisory Boards in Innovation. Add
co-design sessions to their meetings. Most companies already have one
or more customer advisory boards. Shift these from “show and tell and
get feedback” meetings to include 50% customer co-design. Have your
Advisory Board members pick their hottest topic for each meeting. Let
your top customers work shoulder to shoulder with your top execs and
the appropriate subject matter experts to redesign the things they need
to reach their goals. We also offer consulting in customer innovation.
3. Harness the Brainpower of Your Existing Online Customer Communities. Most
of you have at least one kind of online customer community. This is
typically a customer support or self-service online forum of some kind.
You may have it already set up to enable customers to ask questions of
your subject matter experts. Now, make sure that customers can see and
answer each others’ questions. Add an easy place for customers (and
employees) to offer suggestions (see Dell’s IdeaStorm
for an example). In particular, encourage customers and end-users of
your products and services to offer their own shortcuts, work-arounds,
application notes, algorithms, spreadsheets, etc. Provide kudos and
acknowledgement to those who do so. Get your product development team
to participate actively in these discussions and forums. Have them poll
the online customer community about priorities and features they’re
working on to get customer input early. Have someone regularly go
through customers’ suggestions and issues to rank order these for
implementation. If you’re really good, your customer community will
take it upon themselves to pull all the best ideas out of the customer
support Q&A threads and turn them into prioritized requirements.
That’s what National Instruments’ customers do in National Instruments’ LabVIEW Developer Zone. See a list of our research on customer communities. For assistance with launching or improving your customer communities, contact our community expert, Matthew Lees, at [email protected].
4. Run Online Contests for New Ideas and/or to Solve Tricky Problems. Many
companies have had good luck (and gotten great PR) out of running
contests with a nice prize (this can vary from an iPod to several
thousand dollars in value). Pick a thorny problem or an opportunity and
encourage your customers and partners to submit their own solutions.
Make sure to ask for their contest entries in ways that will be easy
for you to productize or commercialize. For example, ask them to submit
a video demonstration along with filling in a form to address the
questions and issues that will be important in deciding how and whether
to commercialize their solutions. Of course, you’ll need to be very
clear about intellectual property rights. In most contests, the
contestants are giving you the right to use their IP.
5. Post a Challenge to an Innovation Marketplace. Check out Innocentive and InnovationExchange
as good examples. These are two of the several platforms that have
evolved to connect companies who need innovative solutions with subject
matter experts in a variety of fields who may be able to come up with
the perfect invention or innovation. The nice thing about these
platforms and their communities is that you can post a challenge
anonymously, if you choose to do so (to keep your competitors from
finding out what you’re up to). Many of the people who participate are
true experts in their own disciplines and may be able to see an
application for a proven solution to a different industry or
discipline. The companies who run these innovation exchanges take care
of the thorny issues like intellectual property ownership. They also
help you pose your challenge in the way that will be easiest for
solution providers to understand.
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#5 speaks to me, since I recommended the same idea to generate additional social community interest for a website. Unfortunately, my proposal seems to have fallen on deaf ears and traffic to the site continues to be weak. Thanks for reinforcing my feelings on how to get people to participate. I linked to your piece in my blog post today at the Innovators-Network with hopes that some of my readers will come your way! Best wishes for continued success.
Anthony
Posted by: Account Deleted | July 30, 2008 at 11:54 AM