Co-creating with Customers (from: Jennifer Rice)
http://brand.blogs.com/mantra/2005/03/cocreating_with.html
Reveries has a great article today about several companies that are co-creating products with their customers.
About three-quarters of attempts at innovation fail because of the waycorporations go about it, says Eric Von Hippel of M.I.T., as reportedby in The Economist (3/10/05). According to Eric, who is also about to publish a book called Democratizing Innovation,the mistake is that the firms typically send market researchers outinto the field to identify "unmet needs" and then turn the results overto product-development teams. He says they should instead identify "thefew special customers who innovate" and invite them in to brainstormthe possibilities. That’s the way GE’s healthcare does it. GE callsthese special customers "luminaries" and they meet regularly to discussGE’s latest technologies and how to turn them into products.
…Staples held "a competition among customers to come up withnew ideas. It got 8,300 submissions.
…Two years ago, BMW "posted atoolkit on its website" that allowed its customers to suggest ways inwhich the carmaker "could take advantage of advances in telematic andin-car online services." About 15 of the 1,000 customers who used thekit were invited to meet with BMW’s engineers in Munich and some of theresulting ideas are now in concept stage.
…Back in 1997, Lego was about three weeks away from launching a"build-it-yourself robot development system" called Mindstorm, whenabout 1,000 hackers "downloaded its operating system, vastly improvedit, and posted their work freely online. After a long stunned silence,Lego appears to have accepted the merits of this community’s work:programs written in hacker language may now be uploaded to theMindstorms, mindstorms.lego.com, website.
In any case, as Eric Von Hippel notes, the concept doesn’tcost much because many customers consider being "listened to"compensation enough. As BMW’s Jeorg Reimann explains: "They were sohappy to be invited by us, and that our technical experts wereinterested in their ideas. They didn’t want any money."
For a pretty extensive conversation about co-creation, check out the posts over at Brandshift here, here and here.