Outside Innovation: Excited about this week's Smart Customization Seminar at MIT!

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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.

November 09, 2008

Excited about this week's Smart Customization Seminar at MIT!

I'll be attending Frank Piller's Smart Customization seminar Monday and Tuesday this week. I missed the event last year. Frank is one of the most "plugged in" people on the planet when it comes to mass-customization and user-led innovation.

Preparing for the event by catching up on Frank's blog, Mass-Customization and Open Innovation News, has me wondering whether "smart" or mass-customization isn't a good way to combat the global economic crunch.

How DO you differentiate your products at a time when people are spending less and cutting back?

You turn them into "my products"! or unique, eco-friendly products! Or both!!

A case in point: I ordered custom M&Ms for my grand daughter's birthday bash and ordered inexpensive one-of-a-kind designer jewelry from a designer in South Africa that I found on the Ponoko site.

If you're attending the conference, let me know, so we can meet up! I'll be blogging during the event.

Posted by Patty Seybold on November 09, 2008 in Customer-contributed content, Customization, Innovation, mass-customization, Open Innovation, Outside Innovation, Peer Production | 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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November 09, 2008

Excited about this week's Smart Customization Seminar at MIT!

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