New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold
Description
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.
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.
MIT's Smart Mobility Project Featured at TEDx Boston
I enjoyed Ryan Chin's presentation about the MIT Smart Cities' mobility on demand project. It's a compelling vision with some great green engineering (intelligent wheels, folding electric cars and one-way vehicle-sharing). An important next step: creation of the software required to manage the dynamic pricing required to incentivize people to return cars, scooters, and bikes to the locations with the most demand. Here's a link to my report on the innovative work being done by this team under the visionary leadership of Prof. William J. Mitchell at MIT.
Here's the great conceptual map that CollectiveNext created during Ryan's talk.
Image: Franco Vairani
Comments
Innovations such as mobility scooters have really helped the disabled become independent. I wish there was more government funding of such projects.
Mobility scooters are a great boon not only to the elderly and disabled, but also to the environment... they're battery powered and so cause no pollution!
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Innovations such as mobility scooters have really helped the disabled become independent. I wish there was more government funding of such projects.
Posted by: Documentation expert | October 06, 2010 at 04:56 AM
Mobility scooters are a great boon not only to the elderly and disabled, but also to the environment... they're battery powered and so cause no pollution!
Posted by: Absar@Go Chair | October 05, 2010 at 02:11 AM
Mobility Scooters: Driving away all the mobility woes of physically challenged people!
Posted by: Jas Dulai | August 12, 2010 at 08:46 AM
This is such a great technology. I just hope this would also be available here in my country because this would definitely benefit many.
Posted by: Dave Juno | April 15, 2010 at 10:46 AM