Outside Innovation: Best of Our Customer Co-Design Articles

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.

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Observations

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.

February 07, 2014

Best of Our Customer Co-Design Articles

Here are our best recent articles to help you get your customers more engaged in your customer impacting projects this year:

In 2014: Deliver Breakthrough Customer-Centric Results

What if you could deliver fantastic results in 2014: exciting new products, great customer uptake, leave your competitors in the dust, and deliver incredible value to your end-customers which will translate into broader reach, faster adoption, higher revenues, and lower costs? You can. It’s simple to do. Select the right target customers and get them engaged all the way through your planning, development, piloting, launch, and rapid iteration of any customer-impacting projects. You’ll inject customer-centricity into all of those steps in any project by engaging customers (or target end-users) to help. You’ll have guaranteed early adopters, and they’ll help you cross the proverbial chasm by ensuring that you’ve considered and dealt with all the potential roadblocks to adoption.