Outside Innovation: Currency

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.

April 05, 2013

What You Should Know about the Bitcoin Revolution

What would you do if you feared that your bank was going to confiscate the bulk of your savings? You'd remove your funds from that bank, wouldn't you? That's what's happening all over Europe (and in other parts of the world), triggered by the “haircut”that customers of Cypriot banks received on March 29th, 2013. According to an article in the British Daily Mail:

Nobody can remove more than 300 Euros a day from their account.

Nobody can take more than €1,000 off the island in cash.

80% of deposits over €85K is gone! 37.5% of it has been converted into probably worthless shares of the bank's stock. And 40% will be repaid to you only if the bank “does well”in the future, while 22.5% will go into a contingency fund that could be subject to further write-offs.

Here’s one example from a British ex-pat, living in Cyprus, who didn’t move fast enough to remove his funds:

“Neil Hodgson, 48, who moved to Paphos, on the southwest coast of the island, six years ago, said he has lost nearly £200,000. The former farmer, who has two accounts with the Bank of Cyprus added:
‘I had more than £300,000 in my deposit account and £20,000 in my current account. When I went to the bank the other day I was told the total balance for both is £100,000.’

They were unable to explain how this had been worked out, but indicated I might get some back at a later stage. I checked online and confirmed that the 20,000 in my current account remains, but that I only have £80,000 in my savings account. It's robbery, plain and simple.’”

~ Quoted by Dan Atkinson and Ian Gallagher in
‘It’s Robbery!’ New Cyprus bombshell as Britons are told they may lose EVERYTHING over £85k

Surprising (?) Rise of a Non-Banking Payment Ecosystem: BitCoin

Even before the banking bailout in Cypress (why are they going after customers and not shareholders and bond holders?), our private Pioneers’ discussion list had been buzzing with postings about Bitcoin since October, 2011. At first, it seemed like an interesting “techie” phenomenon—an anonymous secure way to transfer and exchange digital currency (which can be converted into national currencies) in a peer-to-peer network that is distributed, does not use banks, is unregulated and not easily monitorable by government agencies. Perfect for laundering drug money, engaging in drug or gun trafficking, or just hedging your bets against bank runs and/or massive inflation that devalues your local currency. (Photo Credit: ZCopley@Flicker)

However, Bitcoin is a confusing, highly technical, and not very user-friendly alternative to the current financial system. It is also highly volatile. So the chances of its becoming mainstream seemed pretty slim. But notice what has been going on. The total value of the currency being traded in Bitcoins has now surpassed $1 billion.