Let Your Customers Co-create
Yesterday the Danish business newspaper Erhvervsbladet carried a feature about how to engage and involve your customers in the product development process.
As we’ve written about before, we see open innovation as one of the single most interesting things happening in innovation management. Due to the ubiquitous IT and Internet infrastructure people are now beginning to unleash their enormous creative potential. That means companies must consider how to channel this peopledriven wealth of creativity and knowledge into their way of doing business and at the same nurture mutually meaningful relationships.
Our take on this is really quite simple; each function in the company can with a great advantage experiment with customer participation. Whether you’re doing market intelligence, developing products or doing marketing, it’s possible to create value by engaging and interacting with your customers. In the feature I describe three of the approaches we recommend clients to use in their business strategy: Listen, Involve and Create. It’s in Danish only, but stay tuned at the blog for more on this later.
It’s still a very new and rather pristine territory to venture into, but to judge from the momentum co-creation processes are gaining at the moment, I believe it’s time to at least start doing research and explore the possibilities. These are a few of the books and articles I would recommend, if you’re about to delve into the area. The list consists of top-of-mind recommendations and is absolutely not exhaustive, it’s in beta mode. If you have other suggestions, I would love to hear about them.
Books:
- The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks by C.K. Prahalad
- Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott
- Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe
- Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li
- Democratizing Innovation by Eric Von Hippel (Download for free here)
- Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology by Henry William Chesbrough
Articles and web videos:
- If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone – New York Times (free registration required)
- The next step in open innovation – McKinsey Quaterly (free registration required)
- These Brands Build Community – Adweek
- The Rise of Crowdsourcing – Wired
- Something new under the sun (special report) – The Economist
- Charles Leadbeater at TED: Collaborative Innovation (Video)
- C.K. Prahalad on co-creation (Video)
Websites and cases: