Outside Innovation: Citi

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.

September 07, 2012

Whom Do You Trust as Your Mobile E-Wallet Provider?

Coming Soon: Pay for Everything Using Your Mobile Phone
By Patty Seybold

Starting this fall, e-wallets will become available for our mobile phones. When I use the term “e-wallet,” I’m talking about enabling consumers to pay for things using their mobile phones and to pay each other via mobile phone. No cash, no plastic credit cards, no checks needed. You carry your money, credit cards, debit cards, rewards points, and loyalty cards around with you digitally. At the point of sale, you choose which payment type you want to use: take cash from your checking account, use money you’ve pre-loaded on a stored value “card,” charge it to your phone bill, charge it on a credit card account and pay later, and so on. Like a physical wallet, you can put things into it and take things out of it. And you can carry it around with you wherever you go.