Outside Innovation: CNN

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.

June 10, 2008

CNN’s I-Report Initiative Promotes User-Generated Content

During our Visionaries meeting, which was held in Atlanta in mid-April, we had the opportunity to tour CNN and to meet with Tyson Wheatley, one of the founding editors of CNN’s I-Report initiative. This is the section of CNN’s Web site (www.ireport.com) where anyone over the age of 13 can upload their own photos, videos, audios, and/or text submissions as long as that content complies with CNN’s terms of use. It’s a great site to follow for those of you who are interested in learning how to leverage user-generated content.

Tyson told our small band of Visionaries that the team responsible for creating, piloting, and shepherding i-report.com into being has been “about 1.5 people” until very recently. Now the group has grown to about 7 employees. They’ve had strong support from CNN management from the outset.

The idea behind i-report.com is to take advantage of the power of “citizen journalism.” The people who are closest to breaking news are the ones best equipped to provide photos, videos, and first-hand accounts. CNN has long been the recipient of unsolicited videos and eyewitness reports from far-flung “journalists.” In the past, an editor would always vet the submitted material by talking to the person directly and asking questions to ensure the authenticity of the footage as well as to ensure its legality. Some of the issues that CNN cares about when vetting a submission are the following: the submission can’t contain objectionable or copyrighted material; CNN also need to be careful about where the footage was taken. Was it on public or private property? Who took the video? Only the actual eyewitness is permitted to submit material. Often, Tyson explained, in the case of really breaking news, that screening conversation takes place within minutes of receiving the material. But as the volume of user submissions has increased, it was becoming harder to manage and screen them in a timely fashion.

By creating a section of the CNN.com Web site that is devoted to collecting and featuring customers’ submissions, the CNN editors discovered it was both a good way to make it much easier for people to submit appropriate content and to make it easier for CNN to screen that content to ensure that it meets their standards.