As marketers try to get their companies back on a path to growth, bets on innovation—be it product, service, or other—are top of mind for most of us. Unfortunately, when we ask how approaches to innovation are changing in 2010, most marketers default to a “more” strategy—more spending, more experiments, or more time and attention.
As we begin to dig around for some new ideas, Council members have pointed us to an emerging trend: their best ideas are coming from outside the walls of their companies, or at least outside of traditional marketing and R&D functions. “Outside-the-walls innovation” generally shows up in one of three flavors:
- Customers: Social media channels and general digital connectivity are dramatically increasing the scale and decreasing the costs of getting customers involved in innovation. One of my favorite recent examples is Dell’s IdeaStorm forum.
- Employees: Much like the customer dynamic, social and digital channels are making it much faster and easier to get a critical mass of our employees involved in innovation. Last year I had a chance to talk with John Nevins, head of innovation consulting at BT, on their efforts to make participation in innovation more available to the employee masses (Council members can listen in on that conversation here).
- Other Companies: Perhaps my favorite approach, we’re seeing companies invest heavily in partnerships to fast-cycle innovation, both on the idea generation front and the idea commercialization front. In a recent conversation with Todd Thompson at Avery Dennison, Todd explained how Avery has loosened its grip on promising ideas in an effort to get partner companies more involved in early-stage development. While Avery gives up a little IP, they get speed-to-market, cost advantages, and new capabilities in return (check out a quick debrief on that conversation here).
Customers, Employees, and Other Companies certainly aren’t new-to-world sources for great ideas, but as technology makes it easier to capture diverse inputs, casting a wider net for ideas is becoming much more practical. The Dell IdeaStorm forum mentioned above illustrates the trend—these customers were always out there, and they’ve always had feedback. Dell just made it a lot easier for customers to voice their ideas and for Dell’s product managers to listen.
- A snapshot of Dell’s IdeaStorm forum.
One last thought: regardless of the tactics we employ, any innovation strategy requires that we keep customer outcomes top of mind. Great innovations don’t win or lose based on technical superiority—they help the target customer accomplish something they otherwise couldn’t.
For a quick primer on innovating with customer outcomes in mind, MLC members should check out this tutorial: understanding what customers really want.
Related posts:
Commenting Guidelines
We hope conversations will be energetic, constructive, and provocative. All posts will be reviewed by our editors and may be edited for clarity, length, and relevance.
We ask that you adhere to the following guidelines.
1. No selling of products or services.
2. No ad hominem attacks. These are conversations in which we debate ideas. Criticize ideas, not the people behind them.