Outside Innovation

Re-Inventing the Boston Globe!

Guest Contribution by David Lance

As you may be aware, the Boston Globe, our local paper, is in danger of being shut down--at least the print edition! This has caused one of my readers--David Lance--great angst and some great creativity.. In fact, in his ruminations (below), he came up with some market research suggestions for the Globe and their Union, a Vision of what a useful newspaper should be, and a business plan!!!

Here are Dave's thoughts:

It occurs to me that the Boston Globe union concessions that were made last week did not factor in a single contact by anyone to ask me (the bloody customer) what I want. When customers are so blatantly ignored by the owners and the unions, what can we do to be heard? Since nobody has asked, here are my answers to the questions they might have asked:

• While I like reading news on the Web, it is sporadic and more a distraction than focused information gathering, or relaxed entertainment – such as I get from reading newsprint.
• I dislike the clutter of www.boston.com.
• I love the feeling I get when reading something really compelling from physical newsprint paper while eating a bagel. Perhaps that is reason enough to preserve the media. Perhaps not. Somebody from the newspaper industry might study a person thus focused on a Sunday morning, and create some giveaway accessories they could use to entice some of us back above the fold. Maybe some little gizmo that reliably keeps the orange juice off the bed sheets - for example.

• I want reporters to uncover what I want to read about. I would pay for that.

It would be really nice (not to mention extremely savvy), if somebody from the New York Times or the local unions would maybe talk to me before conceding they can not entice me to trade a hundred pennies for a copy of their newspaper every day.

New York's Metropolitan Museum's Customer Contributions

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just closed its customer-contributed photographs competition. Called "it's time we MET," visitors to the Museum were invited to enter the contest by downloading their photos of their visits to the museum on Flickr. The winner will be announced soon.

Here's the MET's description of this competition:

"'It's Time We Met,' our first visitor-contributed photo contest, was a huge success! Visitors just like you posted hundreds of photographs taken at the Main Building or at The Cloisters Museum and Gardens, all depicting how they've shared their Museum experience with friends and family. The Museum's judges are now in the process of selecting the winning photograph, which will be used in the "It's Time We Met" marketing campaign."

How to Design Your Products (and Business) to Be Customer-Adaptive

        Here’s an update on one of the companies featured in Outside Innovation. CohesiveFT is a software company. Their products are digital. But I believe that some of the patterns we’re seeing as customers create their own digital products hold up well for physical products or for hybrid physical/service products.
       
         In fact, I’m writing this post from St. Louis, the center of the Bio-Belt, where the products that are sold—seed for growing corn, soybeans, fruits, and vegetables—are designed and packaged in ways that are surprisingly similar to today’s hardware and software. As Monsanto's CIO, Mark Showers, explained to me, what’s going on in bio-agriculture is that there’s an increasing split between the hardware (the seed or germ plasm) and the software (the traits) of a plant. Advanced bio-technology has made it possible to optimize the traits at each layer of the seed stack (below ground/roots; ground-level/weeds and pests; above ground/leaves, flowers, fruit). In fact, today’s hybrids come in triple-stacks—soon there will be 4 to 6 stacks—of optimized traits. Farmers select the traits they need in their seeds based on the soil conditions, pest patterns, weather patterns, and their expectations of what the growing season will hold. (Then they hedge their bets through commodities trading where they make their real money!) While farmers don’t CONFIGURE the optimal seed traits at each layer today (that’s done in the lab and on the manufacturing farms), they do SELECT seeds with optimal traits at each layer for different sections of their farmland. It’s a very sophisticated and complex set of choices. Much of the value of the seed resides in the intellectual property involved in optimizing each layer of the stack for the precise conditions required and in the ability to mix and match these traits to meet the particular requirements of a particular strip of farmland in a given micro-climate. Companies license the intellectual property—the traits—to one another.

COMMUNITY 2.0-Leveraging the Wisdom of Crowds

Crowdsourcing 2.0

Kathleen Gilroy, Otter Group
Sylvia Marino, Edmunds.com
Michael Sikorsky, Cambrian House

Kathleen:
Wikipedia definition: relies on a combination of volunteers and low-paid amateurs who use their spare time to create content and/or to solve problems.

Examples of crowdsourcing:
Zazzle I use it to generate stamps as presents for my nephews and nieces.
Goldcorp -- Took its data and made it public and encouraged people to analyze the data and suggest mining opportunities for a reward. (Written Up in Mavericks at Work.)
Threadless--T-shirt design

This notion of earning credentials from crowdsourcing is great.

What’s the Value of Customer-Contributed Content? $1.65 Billion!

Customer-created content is good business. Letting customers strut their stuff is profitable.

Google’s acquisition of YouTube is proof that customer-contributed content is shrewd business practice. Going from zero to $1.65 billion in 24 months is an admirable accomplishment. It’s the kind of accomplishment that makes most business people both jealous and incredulous. Yes, letting customers strut their stuff makes very good business sense, indeed! The content is free. Customers flock to the site to see and be seen. Visitors’ viewing, tagging and downloading habits create a natural merchandising engine. It’s cool because others thought it was cool. I can find it easily because others have tagged it.

Customers are playing the roles of Lead Customers/Users, Contributors, Guides, and Promoters.

 
Customers’ Behaviors have Changed the Business Model for the TV Industry

Customer-led merchandising is great marketing. Letting customers strut your stuff reaps advertising revenues and free publicity.

What tickles me is how fast the entertainment companies ran around in front of the customer parade. After years of posturing and hand-wringing about intellectual property protection in the era of file-sharing and easy downloading, all of the major entertainment companies signed up to take part in the spoils.

As the Google/YouTube deal was going down, the dominos fell throughout the movie biz. According to Hiawatha Bray, YouTube deals hint of new era for Net media - The Boston Globe, Universal Studios, Sony BMG, CBS, Warner Music, et al all quickly inked deals with YouTube and Google that go something like this: “It’s OK with us if customers pirate video clips from our movies and TV programming, you (Google-YouTube) tell us about them and give us 50% of the ad revenues.”

This is “found money” – additional revenues they wouldn’t have gotten. It’s also customer-led merchandising. Customers will vote with their eyeballs and their tagging and rating, highlighting as noteworthy programming that might otherwise lag in the Nielsen ratings.

Now, what about all those home videos? Will amateurs also get 50% of the ad revenues for their amazing pet tricks’ videos?

Crowdsourcing, Customer-Contributed Content or Lead Customer Innovation

Jessi Hempel's article Crowdsourcing: Milk the Masses for Inspiration, in Business Week's Innovation Supplement this week, was one of the few mentions of customer-led innovation in this entire 40-page survey of trends in innovation. (It's interesting that BW devotes so much ink to innovative design and to product innovation, and so little ink to customer-led innovation.)

Jessi referenced consumers designing ads on Current TV ("Make the Ads You Want to Watch!),

customers contributing designs at John Fluevog Boots and Shoes open source footwear site,

and scientists competing to solve thorny problems at InnoCentive. 

Thank you, Jessi, for writing about the important topic of user-led innovation!

"Crowdsourcing" was also the topic of an earlier BW article Crowdsourcing: Consumers as Creators by Paul Boutin, in which Paul referencing the  MIT Sloan Management Review article by Frank Piller and Susumu Ogawa that I mentioned last December. This article has engendered a modicum of whining on the part of readers who feel that designers/inventors should be paid handsomely for their contributions, not "taken advantage of." It's important to point out that the people who choose to contribute their time, creativity and ideas to a contest or a challenge, typically do it, not so much for the money, but for the satisfaction of seeing their ideas realized. And, one colleague said recently, "if you don't want to give your IP away, then don't do it!"