Outside Innovation

Engaging Customers from the Get Go

Do You Really Want Customers Co-Designing Your Business?

I’m currently engaged in the design of a new set of healthcare and wellness services for and with the people in my community. At a strategic planning meeting last week, I was caught short when one of our most committed volunteers looked around the room and said, “when and how should we be engaging with our customers?” I was taken aback. I thought we were the customers! But then I realized that, as soon as you begin to plan a strategy, develop a business plan, and design a set of services or products, you become the company. At that point, you need to re-inject the fresh perspective of the end-customers for the services you’re designing. It’s not really viable for a group of smart, committed people and subject matter experts to design and unveil something, even if you’re designing a set of services you’ll be using yourselves. That’s still the “if we build it; they will come ” model.

When Should Customers Be Engaged?

You need to constantly engage with new prospective customers to get them engaged and co-designing. And you need to do that from the get go. Not just when you’re about to unveil your pilot. The more prospective customers lend a hand, roll up their sleeves, and get involved, the larger your base of committed fans. And the more new people you engage along the way, the greater the likelihood that you’ll always be customer-centric in your design. After all, customers’ needs change, competitors’ inject new challenges, customers’ experiences with businesses in other industries raise their expectations, new regulations require you to develop customer-friendly processes.

So, it’s never too early, nor too late, to engage with thoughtful, insightful customers and prospects to gain a fresh perspective.

Learning from Revolutionaries: Doug Engelbart & John Seybold

My thoughts and prayers have been with Christina Engelbart over the past couple of weeks because her beloved Dad, Doug Engelbart, passed away on July 2, 2013. Christina and I have a lot in common, and we’ve stayed in touch over the years. We both are the daughters of visionary revolutionaries in the computer age. We both worked very closely with our respective Dads. Both of our brilliant fathers had Alzheimer’s disease in their later years. It’s always sad to lose a parent progressively as their mental faculties slip away. It’s particularly tragic to lose the minds of such brilliant men to that dread disease. The only consolation is that when they actually die of physical ailments—my Dad in 2004; hers this year, both at the age of 88—you aren’t as devastated by grief. The loss already occurred, albeit gradually and sadly.

 

Douglas C. Engelbart
(January 30, 1925 - July 2, 2013)

I had the privilege of sitting at both men’s feet. My father, John W. Seybold, revolutionized the electronic printing industry—bringing us electronic newsrooms, electronic hyphenation and justification and pagination, and the precursor to HTML, standardized mark up. Like Doug, my Dad was a visionary—someone who could recruit people into his vision and who actually developed and deployed software and systems to make it possible for people to do things they couldn’t have dreamed of before. The idea of writing our own documents electronically and publishing our own content was a glimmer in my Dad’s eye when he and another visionary, John Tuohey, designed the first electronic newsroom for US News and Word Report back in 1969, giving birth to the Atex system, which became the stalwart in the newspaper publishing industry.

Peer2Peer Business Models

We’re intrigued by a relatively new business model. Referred to as Peer-2-Peer, Peers Inc., or Platforms for Participation, these are match-making businesses in which consumers are both the providers of the service being sold and the customers for the service being sold. To build such a business you need to:

• spot the need for the service
• identify the trend (usually informal) that individuals are already providing the service
• facilitate the matchmaking between people who can provide the service and those who need the service
• provide the infrastructure for providers and consumers to strut their stuff and find one another
• offer risk mitigation
• provide a legal framework
• supply dispute resolution services
• receive a commission

There are now enough examples of these types of businesses that they are becoming quite common.

Celebrate Our Independence and Demand the Consent of the Governed

On July 4^th, U.S. citizens celebrate “Independence Day.” This is the pseudo-anniversary of the issuance of the American Declaration of Independence. (There’s much debate about when it was actually signed.)

 The Continental Congress felt that the Declaration of Independence was necessary to explain why the Resolution of Independence from Great Britain was passed on July 2, 1776 by 12 of the original 13 colonies (New York abstained).

The most famous lines in the Declaration of Independence still reverberate:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”