Outside Innovation: It’s a Bizarre World

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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.

May 02, 2012

It’s a Bizarre World

By Peter Horne, Member of Patty’s Pioneers

Two weeks ago, I read on Facebook that a friend of mine had separated from her husband. There were to date 27 comments on this event which added more color and removed the ambiguity as to whether the separate was temporary or a permanent split.

How bizarre to read about a separation on Facebook!

But I am not sure what is more bizarre. Is it the fact that I get to see the life of a friend that I have not seen for over 20 years, and at this rate will never see in the next 20 years? Or is it the fact that I am friends with the now separated husband of my friend, yet I have never met the husband? Or is it the fact that I read about a marriage separation on Facebook.

Surely this qualifies as a WTF moment. Or is it a LOL?

Hang on, when did we start to communicate in TLAs?

OMG; I am confused.

Am I observing a friend when I haven't seen them for 20 years - what is a friend in the Facebook world?

Am I observing a friend when I haven't met the husband - what is a friend in the real world?

When did people announce separations on Facebook? Is the Facebook world actually now the real world?

I don't know.

But I do know that I now have the separation of a friend that I have not seen for over 20 years from a friend I have never met ingrained in to my Facebook timeline.

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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May 02, 2012

It’s a Bizarre World

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