Outside Innovation

Apple’s Misstep Keeps Kids from Showcasing Their Innovations on iPhone

Oops. Apple goofed.

Last week, Apple did something that created outrage among educators and parents—one of their most important customer segments.

Apple banned the use of a $3.95 iPhone app called Scratch Viewer. Scratch Viewer would have let teachers, parents, and young kids view the 1 million applications that young kids all over the globe have created over the last three years using Scratch.

Scratch is a kid-friendly free programming environment which was developed at the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, based on the work of Seymour Papert and Alan Kay. Mitchel Resnick, the director of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT, had this to say to reporters and on the Scratch blog:

“We're disappointed that Apple decided not to allow a Scratch player on the iPhone or iPad (as part of Apple's policy against apps that interpret or execute code). As we see it, there is nothing more important than empowering the next generation of kids to design, create, and express themselves with new media technologies. That's the idea behind Scratch. Kids around the world are using Scratch to program their own interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations with Scratch—and sharing their creations with one another online. In the process, kids learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. Since the launch of Scratch in 2007, kids have shared nearly 1 million projects on the Scratch website. We hope that Apple will reconsider its policies so that more kids can experience the joys of creating and sharing with Scratch. (By the way, the Scratch player for the iPhone was created by a third party, not by our group at the MIT Media Lab. But our group is planning to make Scratch authoring tools for the iPad in the future, and we hope Apple will allow us....)”

Faithful Outside Innovation followers will recognize Mitch Resnick as one of the heroes in the LEGO Mindstorms’ NXT story. Mitch has been engaging kids as co-inventors at MIT since the early 1980s. He and Steve Ocko were the grad students who connected computers to LEGOs so that young kids could use Seymour Papert’s LOGO language to make their LEGO creations come alive.

Nokia’s Design by Community Phone

Scott Jordan sent me a link to Nokia’s “Design a Concept Phone by Community” site. I’ve been following the traffic and the dialog for a couple of weeks. What Nokia is doing is offering a series of interactive design polls about different aspects of a new concept mobile phone. Here’s this week’s:

Each week you get to “vote” by moving sliders on a different aspect of the phone design:

• Display and User Interface

• Size and shape

• Materials

• Operating System

• Connectivity

• Camera

• Enhancements

Children Are Driving Innovation in Rural Uganda

I am spending two weeks in Uganda at the Uganda Rural Development and Training (URDT.net) programme. My goal on this, my fifth trip, to this incredible hotbed of grass roots, bottoms up innovation, is to midwife a book. The working title for the book is, "It Takes a Child to Raise a Village," a play on the famous book by Hillary Clinton, "It Takes a Village to Raise a Child."

This week, I am working with the 236 girls from the Girls School to help them write their own book—a rebuttal to Hillary's. These girls—who come from families who live on $1 a day in rural villages with no electricity, plumbing, or running water—know that THEY can make a difference in the lives of their families. They have spent the last 10 years becoming change agents for their families' farms and businesses. These 13 to 20-year old young women have the poise, the know-how, the humility, and the quiet determination to help their families create a shared vision of how they want to improve their livelihoods.

Each one of them has a wonderful story to tell about how they mobilized their family members to improve health, nutrition, sanitation, income generation, and family cooperation and harmony in their households. They also acknowledge that they (even at age 14 or 15) have become role models in their communities. People come to seek their advice. They are truly changing the cultural norms in their villages and their families. And they and their families are highly respected because of the role the girls have played in improving their families' incomes while they are attending school.

In so many poor regions of the world, children have to drop out of school and work to support the family. At URDT's Girls’ School, thanks to this unique educational experience, the girls are increasing their families' income while they're away at school by teaching their parents what they've learned about organic farming, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, sanitation, health, and community development. They've also taught their families how to create a shared vision for what they want to achieve and an action plan for getting it done. This is truly remarkable for a group of wonderfully ordinary teenagers in a rural, backward society and a "women don't count" culture.

I feel privileged to be working with these young women! I look forward to sharing the draft of the book with you soon!

How To Provide Customers with a 360-Degree View of Their Context

By Patty Seybold

We need your help! Ronni Marshak and I are revising our book, Customers.com, which was published in 1998. We’d like to “crowdsource” this next generation edition. Every few weeks, we’ll offer you a new chapter or section. We’d like your help in making this a truly useful “Bible” for everyone engaged in designing their businesses from the customers’ point of view. Here’s how:

1. Read the chapters that interest you as they appear and add your thoughts, comments, and criticisms here. 

2. Contribute your own suggestions about companies or organizations that would provide great examples for each chapter—we’ll do the research.

3. Contribute your own ideas—either customer-centric principles you adhere to and/or lessons you’ve learned that you’d like to share. 

In the original Customers.com, the fourth of our eight critical success factors for “Making it easy for customers to do business with you” was “Provide a 360-Degree View of the Customer Relationship.” That mantra has become a holy grail for virtually every organization’s CRM charter. But we think it’s wrong!

In today’s customer-driven economy, customers demand more. They want to drive. They don’t want you to gather information about them in order to sell them more stuff. They do want your help in getting things done.

So Ronni Marshak and I have changed that critical success factor to: Provide a 360-Degree View of Each Customer’s Context. In this chapter, Ronni describes what we mean. We welcome your reactions, feedback and ideas! We are also seeking good examples of at least two case studies to go with this chapter. We welcome your ideas!

How to Revolutionize Your Industry

If your business model is under siege, what should you do? That’s the question that Vikram Savkar asked himself a couple of years ago. At the time, he worked for a publisher of high-priced textbooks. He decided that among the reasons the textbook publishing market is broken are:

• Customers don’t choose what to buy -- the students who buy the books don’t get to choose which books to buy (their professors assign them).
  
• There’s no feedback mechanism for students to react to the material in the textbooks, nor to interact with the people who write them.
  
• There are no real alternatives to traditional textbooks, so publishers can’t tell what their customers would prefer.

So, when he got the opportunity to reinvent what he perceived to be a broken market, Vikram seized the opportunity. This week, we present the a case study on Scitable—the project that Vikram and his team at Nature Publishing Group’s new Nature Education division have launched. You’ll see that they are attempting to create an alternative to science textbooks and to come up with an alternative business model.

As I explored Scitable and learned how students and professors are using it, I noticed that a lot of the third-world students who are flocking to Scitable would probably not have bought $150 textbooks on genetics. So Scitable isn’t replacing something they would have bought. It’s replacing something they wouldn’t have bought. It’s providing a new value proposition to a new market. 

People Learn from People

Another pattern I noticed among our Visionaries was the various ways they connect people to people in the online world. As one participant said, “People don’t learn from information; they learn from people.”

On Visionaries’ Web sites, you notice that students can interact with one another, find experts, interact with their coaches and teachers. Customers can connect with other customers with similar issues as well as with their sales team. Consumers can glean tips and tricks from one another. Customers can see a product that someone else has customized and reuse those patterns to create their own customized product. Seekers can look at a graphical network of experts in a particular field and find the people whose expertise has been frequently published or patented. They can see who else is connected to those experts.

Most visionaries seem to feel that part of their job is to connect their customers with one another so they can learn from one another and share experiences. They also believe in connecting customers with internal experts and resources. They recognize that customers’ needs bridge organizational silos and pull employees and subject matter experts together across those silos. They realize that referrals, social networking, and viral marketing are the engines that drive customer acquisition.

Business Exchange: Good Example of Crowd Sourcing and Social Networking

Ron Casalotti is the Director of User Participation for Business Week’s Business Exchange. Ron’s understanding about how to encourage user-generated content comes naturally. He became addicted to AOL’s online communities in the 1990s. By day, he worked in the leasing business. At night, he would join live chat groups on topics he cared about. Soon, he found himself volunteering as a moderator for a number of AOL communities, including the really popular gaming chat groups.

After serving as a volunteer moderator in exchange for free AOL time, AOL made him an offer in 1997 to come on board full-time to run a number of their most popular communities. After over 10 years hosting and managing communities at AOL (weathering the Time Warner merger), Ron posted his resume on LinkedIn and was immediately tapped by Business Week to come and run customer-generated content at the new Business Exchange site they were planning. “Once I decided to leave AOL, I thought I’d be job hunting for a while, but I walked across the street, and settled into my new job in less than a week.”

LEVERAGE!! You can use your LinkedIn Profile, saving time so you don’t have to create yet another profile! And, when you post on Business Exchange you can have those posts syndicated out to your Twitter feeds.

Leveraging Business Users’ Existing Investments in Social Media

Use Your LinkedIn Profile. Before talking with Ron, I took a look at the site. What immediately tickled me about the Business Exchange site is the way that users’ profiles are “automagically” generated from the profiles we already have on LinkedIn. What a relief, I thought! I don’t have to create yet another profile to participate in this dialog! (You may recall my earlier post “Where’s Your Profile Online?”.) When you register for Business Exchange, you can use your LinkedIn Profile, saving time so you don’t have to create yet another profile!

Tweet Your Responses. Equally useful (for those of us who are overwhelmed by all the demands on our time and our new found need to strut our stuff in public), when you post on Business Exchange, you can have those posts syndicated out to your Twitter feeds. This is a really clever way to convince time-pressed business people that it’s worth their time to read and comment on Business Exchange. And it’s a great way to spawn word of mouth PR.

Contribute Your Content or Content You Value

Here’s the crowd sourcing part: Registered users can contribute articles on a variety or topics, and/or suggest new topics. Your contributed articles wind up right next to the Business Week articles that have been selected and added to the Business Exchange collection. The other thing that’s quite amazing about Business Exchange is how easy it is to add articles to it. These may be articles you’ve written, or articles you’ve found in other publications that you think Business Exchange readers would enjoy. You simply hit the submit button, enter the URL, and it will grab the title and abstract from the originating site, create a link, and all you need to do is comment (if you want to) and hit enter. You might think that this would lead to the site being cluttered with self-promoting junk. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Since you can only submit URLs, rather than blog directly on the site, all of the linked news items and blog posts seem to be of “publishable” quality. If it’s your own blog post, you publish first on your blog, and then submit it to Business Exchange. (It will post right away; you don’t have to wait for approval). If it’s a link to an interesting article or blog post from someone else, Business Exchange creates the links, includes the logo of the originating site and respects their copyright by simply linking to it on the original site.

What’s Missing: Threaded Discussions

Something I find odd about the current Beta version of Business Exchange is that it isn’t very easy to see others’ reactions to articles. Under each article’s abstract you can look at the “Actions” taken on that article, and see which users have saved or reacted to it and what their reactions were. But it’s hard to find. And, there’s no threaded discussion/blog commenting capability that lets you build on others’ reactions (yet). There’s no real discourse happening on the site. Just a lot of great content and interesting people.

When Customers Take You to Unexpected Places

This week I attended a series of panel discussions at Harvard University at the Education in Africa conference and the Kennedy School Bridge Builders program. There were two great stories that really struck a chord with me.

Girl Entrepreneurs

Viola Vaughn is the executive director of 10,000 Girls, a program she founded in Kaolock, Senegal in West Africa. Here’s the story she told about how that program started. Viola is a black American who grew up in Arkansas. She has a doctorate in education from Columbia and spent her career in education in the US and Africa. In 2001, Viola and her husband, Jazz musician Sam Sanders, emigrated to Senegal with their extended family. She said, “I was just planning to sit back and watch my banana trees grow.” But a little neighbor girl kept showing up at her house and asking Viola to teach her. Viola told her she was retired and didn’t do that anymore. Besides, she said, “I don’t teach, I educate.”

But the girl was persistent. She had heard that Viola’s granddaughter was being home-schooled. She wanted home schooling too. Finally, Viola went to visit the girl’s mom to find out why she wasn’t in school. The mother explained that her daughter was “too dumb to go to school.” Viola’s response was “well, she was smart enough to find me!” She relented and invited the girl to come over for lessons. When she arrived, she brought a bunch of other little girls—all of whom had dropped out of the local schools. (In Senegal, Viola explained, if you fail twice, you’re excluded from the public education system.)

Soon, the home-schooling program was outgrowing Viola’s home and she needed to hire more staff. She told the girls they would need to raise money if they wanted to continue their education. They responded by saying, “in America, girls sell cookies to earn money. Do you know how to bake cookies?” The next thing she knew, the girls had set up a bakery operation and were producing and selling enough cookies to hire a few teachers. Later in the story, she said the bakery led to a tea plantation. The girls found got someone to donate the land, and began planting and growing tea. When they applied for Fair Trade certification, they were originally denied because the Tea Plantation used “child labor” – the girls were working on the plantation after school. Viola explained to the officials that the girls weren’t the labor; they were the owners of the plantation. The money from the plantation went into their bank accounts. In fact, they hired young men to do much of the work. So they got their fair trade certificate.

Football; Not Roads

Jacqueline Akello, the program director at Uganda Rural Development and Training Programme (URDT), talked about the surprises that occur when you follow customers’ lead. Her URDT team went to a village that had invited them to help the community do some development work. As they arrived on site and got a tour of the village, it became obvious to the URDT staff that the thing the villagers really needed the most was an improved road that would let them get produce to market and to gain access to local healthcare. They had mobilized other villagers who wanted to improve their roads, so they were expecting that that would be the project the people in the village wanted. But when everyone started talking about their visions, the idea that popped to the top of everyone’s list was to be able to play football (what Americans call soccer). Their community hadn’t been able to field a team. They didn’t have a place to play. They weren’t participating in the district league. So, the villagers decided they would do what it took to get a football team off the ground. Soon, they had not only cleared a field, organized a team, and gotten uniforms, but they began to win some games.

Jackie reported that, within a season, many of the people in the village were socializing in ways that they hadn’t been before. The football club had created a missing social network. Soon, they began to think about improving the road so that visiting teams would have an easier time getting to their field to play. Sure enough, within a year, they mobilized community members to improve the road leading to the village and to the football field.

But they didn’t stop there, Jacqui reported, within two years, the same group of villagers had worked together to build a school which now houses 1200 students! The moral of the story? Let customers lead. They’ll take you on a surprising and interesting journey!

Why Twitter Rules (and What to Do About It)

In the past few months, the Twitter phenomenon has reached epic proportions. Personally, I chalk this up to the malaise that is gripping us all as we struggle to make sense of both the economic crisis and the political seismic shifts that are upon us. Not content to consume news media and blogs, we now all want to make sense of it, to share our observations, and most of all to connect. So this odd 140-character microblogging platform, known as Twitter, has ballooned in importance. In the last week, the Financial Times published a full-page article about Twitter. U.S. Congresspeople tweeted during Obama’s speech to the joint houses of Congress, and Keith Olbermann’s CountDown described the Congressional "Twits tweeting," and John Stewart ran a great spoof on the new Congressional pastime of tweeting. (The software is called Twitter; the short messages you send are called “tweets.” And yes, anyone who IS anyone is doing it.) The best way to get up to speed on Twitter in my opinion is to use the Twitter How To's and links at Mashable. Feel free to drop me a note. My twitter handle is pattyinboothbay.

How Should Your Company Deal with Twitter?

No matter what your personal opinion is about this phenomenon/fad, you should take note about how your customers and prospects are using Twitter and how your company should be engaging with them using this popular tool.

1. Best Use of Twitter: Real-Time Customer Support. The best way to win the hearts and minds of customers and prospects is to set up a twitter search filter on your company’s and product’s name(s) and to ensure that your customer support organization is tracking and responding to these tweets in real time. Oddly enough, when someone is stuck in line at an airport, having trouble with your Web site, or having difficulty using your product, they are highly likely to tweet about it (before they send you an email or call your support line or while they’re doing so). It’s an easy way for people to vent frustration and reach out to the world. If your customer support team responds quickly, both with a public tweet (so others will know you’re listening) and with a Direct Message to offer personal assistance, you will not only solve that customer’s issue but have that positive experience re-tweeted. Here are a couple of good examples:

• Andybeal: Ordered from Office Depot for the first time—won’t use them again. No delivery Thurs—too busy to deliver. Friday? No explanation & no package

• edwinaoki: Comcast outage. Can't get to anything east of Denver. They say "they hope to have it fixed by 8pm". That's 13 hours!

• TESFox: I have to say, Comcast is doing an excellent job of being there for customer service. Hats off for @comcastcares and the live chat team!

2. Planning and Managing Events. Whatever event you’re planning—whether it’s a local gathering of wine connoisseurs, a training class, a big user conference or a new product launch, Twitter should be part of your pre-, during and post-event communications plan. You can create a buzz before the event and encourage participants to tweet their notes, impressions and commentary during the event, and buzz after the event. You can make it easy for groupies and participants to retweet by providing hashtags (#ourevent) that they can embed in each tweet to make it easy to filter and search.

• gavangibson: #UBL Saul Kaplan: innovation=better way to deliver value to customer; zappo.com, virgin

• UserAdvocate: So far #drupalcon:solr is a breath of fresh air. Looking forward to see where he's going with his take on information architecture

• RobynGreenspan: RT @HSMAmericas #WIF09 Patricia Seybold Confirms as Featured Blogger at the World Innovation Forum http://tinyurl.com/abbrxy

3. New Product Launches. Twitter is a great way to get the word out in seductive and non-intrusive ways about upcoming new products or services. Most companies offer a limited number of “beta invites” via Twitter. These become coveted and people start asking for them so they can be part of the in crowd.

• aneel: rt @somic: CohesiveFT launches VPN-Cubed for EC2 - Build-your-own [transatlantic] [on-demand] private network in cloud! http://bit.ly/xqUqa

• utopiah: @tonylucas a friend told me I should ask for a beta invite, since Im curious about cloud computing services, here I tweet ;)

4. Customer Outreach and Gentle Evangelism. Many brand managers have managed to find the perfect tone in their Tweets. They don’t barrage you with blatant PR or marketing. They ask for reactions. They thank you when you DO tweet about their products or brands. They float ideas. They engage with people.

• angie1234p: @RockYourDay Morning Dave. Have I got news for you lol Molson Canadian is on Twitter (@MolsonFerg) Thought you might find it interesting :) [PBS: Fans notice your presence!]

• BlakeSunshine: @jessiecarp I work at National Instruments on www.ni.com/community- hope your semester is off to a great start

5. Drive Traffic to Your Site, Blog, E-Store, YouTube. Apart from free give-aways, twitterers don’t appreciate blatant product pitches. They’ll “unfollow” you quickly. But we do love to pass around links to great funny videos, useful commentary, insightful analysis, useful tips and tricks. Make sure that your contributions include seductive links that people will value.

• artrox: RT @thebrandbuilder @alydesigns @peopledesign: '5 Lessons in Business Innovation' http://tinyurl.com/bnwmvb (design around your customer) [PBS: Note the ReTweet—being passed along—also the use of a “tinyurl” which saves space]

• it_world: The cloud and the public sector - water and oil?: Public sector CIOs should look to the leading cloud computing .. http://tinyurl.com/d7hmep

• QuadrilleKnits: we now have over 3,000 followers on twitter..Quadrille_Books, QuadrilleFood, QuadrilleEco, QuadrilleHome, Student Cook, Jewish_Princess etc!

• doingmedia: @christinawodtke Congrats on the 2nd edition of Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web http://ping.fm/Tlv8A

6. Monitor Your Brand/Reputation. Twitter is the least expensive and most effective way to track your brand’s reputation online. You can just set up a search filter, turn the feed into an RSS feed (so you can capture and analyze it as it flies by) and then take actions to improve customer experience and/or amplify the good vibes.

• tivogrrl: “Enjoyed seeing USAA at Mx 2009. They are a financial services company that really gets customer service.”

• AdayVA: “@VistaPrint Thanks for ease of use and great customer service :)”

• richsharples: “Innovation loves a crisis, but only after customer have stepped out from under their desks” - classic Jonathan Schwartz quote [PBS: Jonathan Schwartz is the CEO of Sun—monitor execs’ names as well as company, brand and product names]

• josephnasto: Wal-Mart Customer Finds Human Teeth in New Wallet http://tinyurl.com/bt7zan

Analyzing Twitter Activity in an Integrated Web Analytics Platform

What if you are in charge of monitoring all search and social media activity around your products and your brands and constantly tuning your brand’s SEO and site merchandising? Ideally, you want an integrated approach for monitoring, analyzing, and taking action on the searches, tweets, blog posts, and buzz that’s swirling around your brand and your products. There are two keys to success:

1. Put the responsibility to monitor, analyze, and take action in the hands of a single coordinated team, don’t silo it across your firm’s PR, social media, e-commerce, SEO and site search, product and promotion merchandising, and customer support teams. Things move fast. You need to be able to get in front of the customer parade, not behind it! It’s fine to have distributed responsibilities for analyzing, tracking, and acting on customers’ buzz, interactions, and activity, but you’ll want to function as a virtual team, and ideally to use an integrated platform—one that lets you spot trends quickly and take action quickly.

2. Provide your team with integrated tools that let you monitor and analyze activity in real time across all of the different internal and external traffic sources that you monitor—those you control and those you don’t control.

The good news is that the leading-edge search analytics and e-merchandising platforms are embracing the leading edge social media trends.

Omniture Embraces Twitter

One of the top search analytics and e-merchandising platforms—the one used by the majority of large brands—is Omniture. It’s good news that the Mercedes Benz of e-commerce search and merchandising is moving with Porsche-like agility to embrace the leading edge social media platform. In a Mashable blog post, entitled: Omniture Adds Twitter Analytics for Brands, Jennifer Van Grove writes:

“You could try one of these 10 reputation tracking tools, but Omniture’s already powerful analytics product, SiteCatalyst, is now the first of its kind to actually import Twitter data for better measurement of brand activity. Omniture’s already powerful analytics product, SiteCatalyst, is now the first of its kind to actually import Twitter data for better measurement of brand activity.

Omniture currently boasts 5,100 clients—think AOL, Microsoft, Oracle, and eBay—capturing more than 1 trillion online transactions per quarter, and is now hoping to support their clients looking for Twitter insights on par with the standard Web analytics they’re used to receiving.

After importing Twitter data into SiteCatalyst, Omniture customers will be able to identify brand advocates and detractors, better acknowledge feature requests from loyal users, categorize Twitterers as customers, vendors, or employees, and get real-time alerts via email or SMS based on specified criteria like spikes in brand mentions. Users will even be able to generate limitless keyword reports - via tweet text scanning - to further segment, analyze, and dissect Twitter-related brand data.”

Spreadshirt: Making It Easy to Be Your Own Brand

Like sneakers, custom-designed and printed T-shirts are a huge category in mass-customized products. Spreadshirt is one of the most mature companies in this space. It was founded in Leipzig in 2002 by Lukasz Gadowski and Matthias Spiess, and quickly became a European market leader in personalized clothing. The original idea wasn't a direct-to-consumer play, but an online shop partner that would empower small retailers to create and sell their own branded goods. With the combination of a well-designed Web infrastructure and custom manufacturing expertise, the firm grew from a prototype to a multimillion Euro global company.

CNN Partners with Spreadshirt

 

Make a Statement

CNN partnered with Spreadshirt to enable customers to make T-Shirts out of CNN headlines.

Refocus on Shirts and My Brand

Jana Eggers is now the CEO of this company, which has offices in Leipzig and Boston. "We're a creative, personalized apparel company. We have millions of direct customers and over 300,000 shop partners."

Jana told the story of the refocusing of Spreadshirt. "About a year ago, we refocused. We were producing a lot of custom merchandise: puzzles, clocks, lanyards, mugs, and, of course shirts. We went through a transition from "you think it, we'll print it" to a laser focus on making it about them—the customers and the products that carry the most emotional impact for them."

They did a lot of soul searching and research. "We asked our employees first; then we went to our customers." They asked customers: "What made it "your own label?" Jana explained. What they discovered is that wearable apparel packed a lot more impact than any other customizable object. And that telling a story or making a statement about yourself is the key emotional driver. Jana said that the phrase that really summed up the customer research for her was: "I wear my shirt every time it's clean." This was the big epiphany. "Shirts are very personal to them. People comment on them. They wear them proudly. We also learned that the process of creation is a really important part of the perceived value of the experience. Many customers commented that they wanted to spend more time in creating their customized shirts; not less."