CUSTOMER INNOVATION GUIDE
Customer Co-Design: The Third Core Competency
By Patricia B. Seybold and Ronni T. Marshak, July 12, 2007 

Have You Mastered the Third Core Competency towards Customer-Led Innovation?
 
In my book, Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future, we specify the five core competencies to master:

For each competency, we provide context and a list of activities (methods/behaviors/programs) you should be implementing to reinvent your organizational culture around customer-led innovation. We also provide you with space to complete your self assessment: how well is your organization/division/department/group doing on fulfilling these requirements? We recommend that you identify those activities broken down into three categories (which mirror our Customer Scenario® Mapping methodology):

Finally, we provide a place for you to make note of your next steps for each activity. We recommend that you include the name of a person who is to take responsibility for the next action as well as a target deadline for completion of that action.

COMPETENCY 3: Customer Co-Design

Some assume that users and customers can’t innovate. That’s simply not true. The problem is that your business isn’t currently set up to find lead users and customers and to engage with them and/or to co-design new solutions with your most visionary customers. Most of your current customers probably don’t care about helping you invent new products. What they care about is getting their own jobs done and their own needs filled. Unless you discover these lead users and commercialize their inventions, or identify them early and equip them with the tools they need to create the solutions they need, you’ll miss the opportunity to harness their creativity.

Remember, the lead users/lead customers have these characteristics in common:

1. Their self-image is deeply connected to the problem domain at hand.

2. They are passionate (positively or negatively) about the outcomes they want and frustrated about the issues that get in the way of achieving those outcomes.

3. They are influential in their organizations and/or in their circle of family and friends.

4. They have thought deeply about their problem space/domain of expertise.

5. They are insightful about their own context, and they can easily articulate their conditions of satisfaction (what works for them; what won’t work).

6. They are imaginative and visionary.

7. They are pragmatic and realistic about the need for viable business models and win/win solutions.

8. If they are true “lead users;”they have already invented their own solutions and often are happy to share their solutions with other insightful users.

So take advantage of these behaviors and shift from passive market research to actively engaging with these customers, understanding their contexts deeply, identifying their desired outcomes and co-designing their ideal scenarios for achieving those outcomes. Forget your own constraints; start with your customers’goals and let them show you how they want to reach them.

Remember too, not to limit your customer co-design activities to the design of new product offerings. Customers are also really valuable in co-designing your business processes to better meet their needs (as well as yours). Insightful lead customers are great at co-designing business models that wouldn’t occur to you without their prodding.

There are many people who know how to consult with customers and to solve their problems. There are lots of people who can market and sell to customers. There are fewer people who know how to survey customers or to run focus groups. But there aren’t that many people (yet) who are experienced at co-designing with lead customers—particularly with groups of them. We’ve been doing this work successfully for many companies for more than a decade. We’ll be happy to train your best people to lead customer co-design sessions. Your co-design facilitators should be excellent listeners and good interviewers. They should be visionary thinkers—able to think outside the box and encourage others to do the same. They need to be respected and influential in your organization, otherwise the good work they do with your lead customers won’t result in action.

2. COMPETENCE IN CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN

You should look to your customers to work with you in co-designing your next generation of products, services, customer experience, and even business models. They are the ones who know clearly what they need to be successful in their jobs, their families, and their lives. And they can tell you how you can provide them with what they need.

This report continues…

To read the full report: http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=835.