Outside Innovation

Why Not Let Customers Help Create Your Objectives?

We all know that you get what you measure. When we experience a dysfunctional organization, we know that we should be suspicious of the objectives that managers and employees are motivated to achieve. In fact, based on the experiences we’re having, we can often guess at the firm’s compensation structure and/or culture. Here’s one example that is top of mind for me: Someone hit my car when it was parked. Their insurer was GEICO. Within 30 minutes of the accident, GEICO called me, told me they were taking responsibility and arranged for appraisal and repair. GEICO is obviously optimizing rapid claim settlement for “no brainer” claims.

U.S. Healthcare Industry: Focused on Productivity and Quality Metrics

There’s been a lot of discussion about how broken our healthcare system is. We pay for transactions, not outcomes. Physicians are measured on their “productivity,” e.g., how many patients can you see (and bill for) in a day? Hospital staff are rewarded for getting patients out of beds as quickly as possible, but fined if that patient winds up back in the hospital within 3 weeks.

Mobile Apps: The Path of Least Resistance for Customer Co-Design

We predict that 2015 will be a great year for customer co-design initiatives. There are four converging trends that bode well for customer-centric executives:

1. Mobile app development is a popular investment among top execs.
2. Mobile apps are well-suited to customer co-design.
3. Mobile apps require close integration with customer portals, customer-facing web sites, social media, contact centers, and customer service.
4. Customers’ priorities and success metrics (transmitted through stories) trump organizational politics.

Mobile app development is only one of many areas in which customer co-design shines. Ideally, you want customers to lead any new product or service innovation or re-design activity. But let’s get real. Embedding customers into your internal design and development processes is hard. It’s counter-cultural for most organizations.

Innovation: Creating vs. Problem Solving

I was recently engaged to facilitate an “innovation discussion” between a client’s cross-functional innovation team and an insightful team of people from one of their customers. The session didn't meet my expectations. 

Don’t get me wrong; it was a valuable interchange. My client learned an incredible amount about their customers’ (mostly implicit) business drivers, about the real-world constraints of their particular business, about the seemingly intractable problems they had. Their customers learned new ways to think about and to solve some of their operations’ problems. Both teams bonded and agreed to continue working together closely on mutually beneficial projects. The customers were grateful for the opportunity to step back from daily operations and think more strategically. My client will no doubt win more business from this account. My client’s top execs gained a shared, holistic understanding of their customer’s operating environment. Everyone enjoyed themselves. Not a bad outcome for 5 hours of guided conversation.