Outside Innovation: American Institute of Physics (AIP)

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.

March 04, 2010

Creating AIP UniPHY, a Social Network for Professionals

Last week we wrote about the importance of creating a 360-degree view FOR customers of their information. The American Institute of Physics' UniPHY portal does that and more. If you are a professional physicist, one of the things you care about the most is your professional reputation as exemplified by the seminal research you have published. AIP provides each published author (their customers) with a view of all their published papers. But UniPHY doesn’t stop there; AIP's published authors can not only see their articles, they can see all their co-authors' articles, and all the other experts who have published on similar topics.

Further, API has taken a unique approach to social networking—one that seems well-suited to the behaviors and interests of their constituents: physicists, materials scientists, mathematicians, astronomers, and others engaged in the physical sciences. AIP has taken an existing implicit social network—people who collaborate and publish research together—and made it explicit.

There are a number of lessons to be learned from AIP’s experience launching and nurturing UniPHY:

• It pays to invest in creating a rigorous taxonomy.

• People care about people. People find each other much more fascinating than “things.”

• If people already have public personas and profiles, pulling that information together and presenting it in an easy-to-use manner is not likely to alienate them.

• Don’t underestimate customers’ pride of authorship and ownership.

• If you are in the publishing business, looking for new business models, consider offering free value-added services on top of your paid content.

• Be clear about which customer scenarios you’re designing for. If you design around customers’ critical activities, you are much more likely to be able to attract and grow a vibrant customer-centric ecosystem that will increase the value of your business!

AIP UniPHY: Creating a Professional Social Network
How the American Institute of Physics Is Creating Value Add for Its Members
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, March 4, 2010

http://www.customers.com/AIP_Case_Study.aspx

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Posted by Patty Seybold on March 04, 2010 in American Institute of Physics (AIP), Best Practices, Business Innovation, Business Models, Social Networking, taxonomies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)