Outside Innovation: Monster.com

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.

Twitter Accounts

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 03, 2012

Does Monster.com Help Job Seekers Manage Their Careers?

Monster.com was originally designed as a Help Wanted/Need a Job matching site. It’s one of the many such sites that have dramatically impacted the employment services industry. Monster was one of the first job-hunting sites and one of the most successful in both fulfilling its mission and in remaining at the top of the heap. One of the things that distinguished Monster.com from the outset was its unremitting focus on the end-customer—the person seeking a job. The original founder, Jeff Taylor, knew that if Monster didn’t cater to job-seekers, they wouldn’t have any qualified candidates to offer to their paying customers—companies’ HR departments and head hunters. Monster.com provides a classic case of designing an online business for multiple audiences/customer bases—some of whom are paying customers and some of whom use the site’s services for free. Catering to multiple audiences means that there lots of areas that are ripe for conflict: head hunters contact job seekers to offer their services (taking Monster’s commissions), yet those same head hunters pay Monster for the privilege. Many job seekers don’t want their employers to know they’re looking, yet they want to throw their hats in the ring.