Outside Innovation

CaringBridge: An Almost Perfect Customer Ecosystem

If you haven’t heard of CaringBridge.org, you should know about it. Eventually you, or someone in your family, will be dealing with a major health issue. CaringBridge provides the support infrastructure to deal with one of the most important, highly emotional, and time-consuming activities that a care-giving family has to deal with: keeping everyone in the loop. Email and/or Facebook work, but they’re not ideal for keeping everyone informed about the latest updates on someone’s battle with cancer, or the prognosis of someone who has just been in a horrific accident.

There are probably newer, spiffier e-tools available. But CaringBridge has something none of the upstarts have: 17 years of experience helping families deal with their health journeys. One of the things that I have learned from working with true Pioneers, is that when you devote ten+ years to understanding and addressing a customer-critical activity—whether that customer’s activity is designing an energy-efficient mobile phone, or managing IT resources, or dealing with a family’s health crisis—your understanding and experience trump all challengers. You deeply understand what the customer’s context is, what they’re trying to accomplish and what’s important to them as they do it. You don’t get distracted by side journeys because you are grounded in solving a real problem for real people: helping them get something done as easily as possible.

Google TV: Will It Spur More and Better User-Generated Content?

I have been intrigued by the flurry of activity surrounding both Apple and Google's most recent forays into television. It's clear that watching the programs and movies I want on my own time and on the go has become a common pastime for the digital crowd. It's also clear that the amount of bandwidth being consumed by increased video streaming and downloading will require different pay-per-use models. I will need to pay more if I consume more video. Otherwise, I'm clogging the airwaves for others with less demanding needs.

There are two things I find most intriguing about both Apple TV and Google TV (via the Android):

1. Combining Web video with TV broadcast video and on-demand movies changes our video watching behavior at home. We can much more easily merge YouTube type videos with favorite movies and TV shows.

2. It opens the door for MORE user-generated content. YouTube and other video sites already make it easy to upload and promote your own videos. Now, as WebTV merges with conventional TV in a Video On-Demand world in our living rooms, more families will gather around to watch user-generated, rather than network-produced and funded videos.

3. Open Source application development platforms, like Google's Android TV, will also make it easier for developers to provide all kinds of useful applications to both direct our attention to content we would otherwise miss and/or to mash it up and make it more accessible in interesting ways. BBC's long-running open source project, BBC Backstage gives some clues to what we can expect. (For more background on BBC's open source project, see Outside Innovation at the BBC.)

Recently, a friend visiting from Sweden purchased and took home a couple of Mac Minis for his two 20-something sons. I asked him how they would be used. He said. "My kids don't use TV. They just watch all their video content over the Web. It's just like phone land lines. They never had a regular phone line. Just a mobile phone. It would never occur to either of them to buy a TV set. They have big screens on the wall and they program the content they want to watch." My reaction: please send them to me and set me up so I can do that too!

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.

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. 

Want Customer-Contributed Content? Make It Easy for Your Customers to Multi-Post

My favorite content creation and social networking tools are the ones that save me time and kill several birds with one stone. I am more likely to post or curate content in an environment that will "automagically" syndicate that comment or posting out to several other sites. I suspect many of you feel the same way. Your insightful customers probably do too—the ones you want to encourage to contribute their thoughts, ratings, and discussions to your Web site, blog, or online community.

As I've mentioned before, I like Businessweek's Business Exchange because I can post abstracts and links of interesting articles or videos that catch my fancy on topics I care about. When I do, Business Exchange automatically posts these contributions to my Twitter and Facebook accounts.

I like the new blogging platform Posterous because it is designed to be easy to post to from email and it also automagically posts to multiple sites, including Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.

I like the fact that anything I "tweet" automatically turns up on my Facebook page, on my blog, on my web site, and in FriendFeed.

In fact, it's so easy to set up these automatic updates among social networking sites, I resent it when the platform or site doesn't provide that functionality and I have to do it myself.

Wikipedia Evolves Its Policies

Wikipedia has a new "flagged revisions" editing policy for certain submissions. I think it makes sense. Under the new policy, your edits to Wikipedia will not be published until they have been approved. The approval is not by a subject matter expert, per se, but by an "experienced volunteer." That's a person who has been editing on Wikipedia for some time and who has not been blocked. The presumption is that these experienced volunteers understand the Wikipedia ethos best. There is no guarantee about how long the approval may take.

What I like about this approach is that it WILL deter the needless vandalism that is so annoying and will therefore improve the quality of Wikipedia articles. Waiting to have one's edits approved is no different than waiting to have a comment on a blog post approved. It's something most of us have gotten used to.

This approval process is designed to reduce the amount of vandalism and misinformation that has been appearing, particularly on the articles about famous people (e.g., Michael Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Britney Spears, etc.). In fact, according to the article, Wikipedia Changes Editing Policy in PC World, this edit approval policy will now apply to all articles about living people.

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.”

Tikatok: Kids Create and Publish Books

Smart Customization and Customer Co-Creation in Action

“I was sitting in a bookstore in the children’s book section with my kids, and I realized that all kids’ books are written and illustrated by adults,” said Sharon Kan.

Sharon is the CEO and co-founder of Lexington, MA-based Tikatok. She described her company at the MIT Smart Customization Seminar on November 10, 2008.

Sharon described Tikatok as “the first online creativity platform for kids.” Tikatok helps kids write, illustrate, publish, and print their own books.

Tikatok is a great example of smart customization in action. Each child’s book is custom-created and printed on demand. The mass-customization platform and ecosystem are designed to enable children to produce high-quality picture books that they and others can buy. The books sell for about $15 to $20 (depending on the number of pages) for soft cover or hard cover. Tikatok can produce these individual or short run books at a 40 percent margin. The published kids’ books are available for viewing and for sale on the Tikatok.com site.

Tagging the Physical World

When I was a young French teacher, I used to put big signs on all the objects in our classroom (which was actually an old farmhouse) with their French names—la table, le cahier, la chaise, le mur, la peinture, le chat (the cat didn’t like it very much!). I was reminded of this practice when I stumbled upon a similar real-world tagging phenomenon that is cropping up in odd places around the world. It’s a form of mobile tagging, using Semapedia and QR Codes. Semapedia is a research site that lets people create two-dimensional bar codes for physical objects, paste a label with the code on the objects, and link those objects to a Wikipedia article. QR codes (which stands for Quick Response) are the specific 2D bar codes that people seem to have gravitated towards. A QR Code is a matrix code created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. While the patent is held by Denso-Wave, the company encourages broad usage. QR codes were originally used in Japan for tracking automobile parts. But they soon began to be used by advertisers who placed them on posters and products in order to provide a quick link to a specific promotion via customers’ mobile phones.

Citizen-Tagging for Fun and Edification

Now, all over the world, people are pasting labels with 2-dimensional bar codes on them onto buildings and objects of all kinds. The purpose of these tags is to provide a link to a relevant Wikipedia article. It’s a citizen-led, guerrilla approach to linking objects in the physical world to useful context and information in the virtual world.

These tags are turning up on stores, museums, paintings, ATM machines, bridges, street corners, parks, records, books, and other types of merchandise. (I found a tag on a carton of San Pelligrino bottled water and another tag on a shelf with Perrier.) If you have a mobile phone with the right software installed, you can point your phone’s camera at the bar code, and the code will be converted into a mobile-URL link to the Wikipedia article about that object. If you take a photograph of the object and upload it to Flickr and add your geographic coordinates, it will also appear on a map which is maintained at Semapedia.org.

Patterns from Innovators

I had the great privilege of participating in an Innovation panel at Sensors Expo in Chicago on June 11, 2008. The panel of experts included Audley Brown, director of advanced propulsion system controls for GM’s PowerTrain group, Dr. Nat Sims from Mass General, who runs SimsLab for anesthesia and critical care, Jon Frederickson from Innocentive who recruits “seeker” organizations to engage in open innovation, and myself. The panel was assembled and beautifully facilitated by John Hanks, vice president, data acquisition and control, of National Instruments.

The panel was fine. But we had the most fun swapping stories and views over dinner the night before. The “formal” discussion in front of the audience didn’t quite capture all the richness of our behind the scenes conversations. I wish there were a way to capture the real deal—the real animated conversations among practitioners—not try to re-create a proxy of it on stage.

Here are some of the themes I noticed in our on- and off-stage dialogs:

- Cross-Industry Idea Transfer is at the Heart of many Innovations

- Platform + Ecosystem + Business Model + Content = Success

- Challenge-based Approach Is Popular and Successful

- Framing the Question Correctly

Cross-Industry Idea Transfer Is at the Heart of Many Innovations

Nat Sims told the story of how he came up with the idea for an intelligent, automated approach to dispensing anesthesia (and, later, other medicines) by using a programmable controller with algorithms based on a database of locally-physician-created, hospital approved, and up-to-date application instructions.