Outside Innovation: DRM

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.

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.

May 19, 2007

Amazon Joins Apple in Offering DRM-Free Tunes

Elizabeth Gillespie's AP-wire story about Jeff Bezos' decision to offer downloads of music by the track without digital rights protection sent Amazon's stock up 4 percent on Wednesday. The Houston Chronical ran her story under this headline: Amazon.com to Launch Digital Music Store. Amazon is taking EMI up on the same deal that it offered to Apple--DRM-free music tracks. According to Elizabeth Gillespie, Amazon is only interested in selling music that can be played on many music players, and is following the "buy it, you own it" business model, rather than the "buy a subscription and play it until it expires business model."

I love the fact that Amazon is joining the fray--the combination of iTunes and the Amazon music store will make the process of buying and listening to digital music (and audio books) much more customer friendly.

Posted by Patty Seybold on May 19, 2007 in Amazon, Apple, Business Models, Customer-Led Business Strategy, DRM, Intellectual Property | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Outside Innovation

New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold

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May 19, 2007

Amazon Joins Apple in Offering DRM-Free Tunes

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