I am David Jeggle, working as an innovation consultant in Berlin, Germany. BrainReactions and my company, called Avenue, do similar things - so we met up last summer to exchange best practices, tips and tricks, and a monthly skype conference keeps us both updated on new stuff going on and generating new ideas for both sides of the Atlantic ocean :-). Having this partnership we are now able to host web brainstormings with people from different walks of life and even nations - which gives us a good advantage especially when working for international organizations. If you know some German, check out my blog www.ideentower.de. Enough talking - let’s get to Customer Driven Innovation and my best practice report:

What this article is about:

- Why it is worth it to include customers into the innovation process
- How did we do with 30 women generating ideas for a mail order catalogue and what methods we used
- How to get customers engaged
- How to detail ideas with customers

I have read a lot in the past about customer driven innovation and it is our daily business to conduct innovation workshops with people from all walks of life. Some companies have included in their internal workshops outsiders like employees of partner companies or one another’s customers. For years we have been recommending to have more customers in these workshops, but a lot of them are reluctant, fearing the possible loss of know-how. AND: A lot of assumptions are circling about these kind of workshops — “nothing new will be developed!” or “they will only tell us, what will not work anyway !” (and so on) are common statements whenever recommending customer support to develop new ideas.

I just came back from a workshop with 30 female clients of a mailorder company (Versandhandel). It was a full-day workshop with existing and former customers. It was very interesting to see how much involvement the customers showed — everyone arriving well ahead of starting time and not wanting the workshop to end. They really felt very committed to the company and were highly motivated. To get “the standard ideas and complaints” off their mind, we started with an open space where everyone had the possibility to express her opinion what is running smooth and what should need some improvement within the existing service.

After a short introduction on creativity and brainstorming and some energizing games we had two brainstorming sessions, generating around 250 ideas for the fictional mailorder company where everything is possible. Though the clients did not have to worry about implementing the ideas it was hard to keep them away from evaluating and judging the ideas within the idea generation.

In the next step we gave the clients the possibility to vote on the ideas in two different clusters:

1. Ideas which are interesting but reflect incremental change, or have been implemented by others already
2. Ideas which are totally new and would make this mailorder company to something special

This two point voting method gives those ideas a chance that normally would not be even looked at. AND: On some ideas you will have different opinions as people perceive things differently.

In a third step, we detailed the ideas in small groups, using questions such as:

• How would this idea look like exactly when implemented?
• What is so special about this idea?
• What should not happen with the idea?
• Would you be attracted by this idea? (Positive points & Minus points)

With the last point you have to have in mind, that a lot of innovations were not really seen as such by customers, so you have to be a little careful about that. Who thought of people running around the woods with sticks would be such a trend. Not one customer might have anticipated the Nordic Walking trend. But you definitely can use these workshops to get some good consumer insights and to understand their needs and wants (sometimes you may have to “drill down” a bit).

Result: It doesn’t take much to drive customer innovation: A lot of ideas that the mailorder company had generated beforehand and had perceived as great ideas, were declined by the customers. And: In addition, the mailorder company got (especially in side-discussions and during lunch) a lot of feedback on services and products and a deeper look into what customers really want. At the end of the day, customers showed high overall satisfaction and the relationship between them and the company got even closer. The key to success was to put atmosphere and fun first. We had chosen an excellent location with excellent food, and added a lot of activities and exercises to keep the group at a high level of energy during the whole day. AND: As I was, apart from the marketing director of the mailorder company, the only male in the room, during lunch I had the slight feeling to know now, how women think. .-))

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Innovation Techniques, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, Corporate Innovation | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

“Safety first!” is a phrase that I remember hearing as a kid. I can’t remember if it came from my mother, or from some group that I was associated with, but nevertheless the opposite is the truth with creativity. Often I am asked to take a gander at some new type of product or story. Often I am as excited as a dog hearing his leash get taken off the hook for the opportunity, but more often than not, I am disappointed at the proverbial safety pins of ideas that I come to see.

Usually I am just happy that the person that is showing me this idea has enough spirit to stick their neck out. At least they are not trying to hoard their ideas like so many do until the idea is either designed or until someone else has made the idea obsolete. At least these people are communicating, but usually the idea is lacking any creativity at all.

A lot of the time you can see patches of what they wanted to say. In a recent story, I read a line about a giant baby kicking someone in the spine, the line was new… I had never heard it before and it called my attention. However, the rest of the story was written for someone else, and because of that the joy of reading the work was annihilated. It was as if this peer thought that too much creativity would bore an audience, so he calmed down and wrote a story that lacked the zip of a creative beat and the only thing I remember is the kicking baby.
One of the best stories that I have read in college came from a peer called Fred: it was about the Greek god Diogenes masturbating in Central Park as a virgin Brittney Spears talked to him about the morals of Pepsi. That is a story that stayed with me. It was not safe and it was a story that had an ending, a lively one. It took guts for a college freshman to write that and turn it in. By the way, Fred got an A, and he deserved it because he made a statement. Creativity is like the field of dreams, if you have a field and don’t like slaving over corn then build a field where fallen invisible baseball legends can play to fill the void of tourist destinations in Iowa. Just think about that next time you play it safe.

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, New Concepts & Ideas | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

What our peers buy influences our own decisions on purchases. What I’m suggesting here is a new way for companies to take advantage of the influence and respect the consumer has for the opinion of his peers.

The idea is, you sign up through a company or web search site (like google) to take part in this program and create a comprehensive profile. Upon purchasing an item, you write a review of it. Now, if a peer (based on analysis of your profile) searches for a similar product, they would receive not only relevant ads, but also their peers’ reviews of the product.

Companies would pay a slight premium to be part of this innovative marketing approach, and the consumer would get points for each review written. Those points could converted to $ and disbursed via pay-pal or some other incentive.

I would certainly pay more attention to a review or rating of a peer than I do to the search based ads one normally gets. Alternatively, a summary of your peers’ ratings could appear for each product. Another option could be weekly updates about what your peers are buying. And, to guard against unscrupulous bumping up of positive reviews, one could require a cell phone number to be eligible as a peer reviewer.

Using this approach, products could be marketed in a very specific and targeted way to different groups of consumers with little added cost to the company hawking the goods.

No Comments | Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

We saw in the ad campaigns for the Super Bowl the first real push to get consumers to come up with marketing campaigns for products. This was a very successful approach for the companies involved as they not only produced innovative, consumer driven ads, but also received secondary publicity from the contests.

I’d like to see companies take this a step further and begin introducing contests in which the consumers come up with ways to make products more environmentally friendly. This would not only allow the eco-conscious among us make the world a little greener, but it would also provide secondary publicity not only from the contest itself, but also from news stories about the company’s environmental friendliness.

So many of us in Gen-Y want greener products and would respond positively to a company and their products given the knowledge that they are trying to innovate to provide a greener world.

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Generation-Y wants, Marketing to college students, Corporate Innovation | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Opening the latest Vogue or GQ, readers are flooded with images of Uma Thurman, Matthew McConaughey, and Lindsey Lohan telling you that their product makes you a star or is what the new hip thing. But in all reality, is this an effective way to advertise anymore?

As a college student, most of these types of items are out of reach and otherwise, the celeb is not someone I would like to associate myself with. What happened to the plain Jane model, why does every product need to be paired with a certain Hollywood star? If anything, the fact that stars like Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt get paid millions of dollars to be in a 30 second ad and endorse a product turns me off and makes me think that the company has run out of creativity choosing the overused celeb endorsement. Campaigns that are clever (e.g. the Truth campaign, iPod dancing people) are few and far between. It’s a fine line between projecting an image of cool by using a celeb and reflecting that it is simply something that a normal person would never look good in.

With all the computer technology that now allows a billboard or ad to literally change a person’s appearance to be more ‘appealing’, how can a person trust an ad in general? (Check out the transformation of a model from before makeup to billboard at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=v3YvvFbsj94) Do advertising campaigns ever think of the societal impact they can create in the minds of their target market? Is Mischa Barton really the best example of a normal young adult for a clothing line?

Basically, celebrity endorsements show laziness or create unreal views of how the ‘normal’ person should look like. Most people don’t find them realistic; yes, I wish I had lips like Angelina Jolie and a butt like Jennifer Lopez, but that isn’t real. What happened to the creativity seen in the Levi’s commercials in the mid 90s or cool Propel fitness water ads of people appearing from drops of water? Companies need to bring the ad campaigns back to reality and give people some fresh ideas to inspire new product consumption rather than the surrealism of a celebrity image.

No Comments | Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Voice of the customer | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

I am a recent college graduate and soon will be looking for my first “real job” in the US (currently I am an English teacher in Korea). During my time in Korea I have had a plethora of free time for self study about different career paths and random opportunities. The internet has been invaluable for this because it has allowed me to search for books on amazon, read the wall street journal, listen to podcasts on various topics and find out what type of job I am interested in.

Here is my problem:

I have finally started narrowing down my ideas for what type of job I want but now I need to think about companies. I believe we are in a unique position as Gen-Y youth because with all this information available to us we should really be able to find a company that works with our lifestyle.

For example: I love the prospect of work, but I also love to travel. There is no website (that I know of) that ranks businesses (most likely big) on the amount of travel time it gives their employees.

Take it a step further. I want a website that ranks different companies in several ways from 1. job perks, 2. management styles, 3. a place for current employees to freely, candidly and anonymously criticize (for better or for worse) their company. I also want to know what kind of medical insurance, travel time, overtime, salary and just about anything else that the company does.

Then I want all of this data to be collected and used under many different areas such as 1. best companies to work for, 2. best companies to work for in different fields, 3. I want to be able to compare different companies so that I can truly gain insight into different companies.

For example: In my perfect job website I will be able to compare different companies on one or many different variables. Therefore, I can use salary, travel time, and employee welfare (filled out by employees from the company) as the variables. I can then choose companies I have heard of and compare them, or have the website find the best companies to compare with those variables.

This will be a powerful tool for the employee. The world is changing and so is the business world. People are different, and companies all have different cultures and various factors that make them better or worse. Why just find a job when you can find a job that fits you?

I believe that with a tool like this people will find jobs that they truly care about, and as I know personally and have heard: If you care about what you are doing you will do a much finer job in the long run.

Hope this wasn’t too long.

Eric.

No Comments | Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

It seems that its about time for me to weigh in again about the sorry state of marketing geared to Gen Y individuals. Granted, I can be a very judgmental individual, but there are so few really quality marketing campaigns out there that I often find myself telling my friends that there needs to be a group that has to approve all marketing campaigns and ads to save us from having to watch some of the truly awful ones.

On that note, I’d like to propose an option for companies looking to market to Gen Y and college students. Marketing firms should be making use of the internet to put together focus groups who watch the ad campaigns via streaming video or evaluate print ads on some website. By mining the data on social websites like Facebook and MySpace, companies could identify individuals that they want to be part of the focus group and invites could be sent to those individuals with a promise of compensation for participating.

I’m sure there must be online focus groups already in operation, but aside from using the social websites to identify individuals to take part in the group, my other innovation for this undertaking would incorporate a device to monitor physiological responses from the individual watching the ad. I remember a West Wing episode in which a focus group watching Bartlett giving a state of the union address were monitored using a simple dial that they adjusted in response to what Bartlett was saying. A simple extension of this approach would be a device that is shipped to the individual in the focus group. The group members would hook this device up to a USB port on their computer and before watching the ad, they would place their hand on the device, which would measure electrical and physiological responses to the ad. A baseline could be taken by also showing the group members ad campaigns that the company thinks are ones they either want to emulate or not emulate.

This approach would allow marketing firms to reach the ever so important Gen Y demographic in a very controlled manner and would also provide more information than they would get from a simple form that group members would also fill out after watching the ad campaign.

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Managing Generation Y | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

37Signals (the guys behind Basecamp, Ta-da Lists, Writeboards, Campfire, and Backpack) have recently released their book Getting Real. It’s free to read online, but you can buy it in paperback or PDF format, too.

The book, a collection of essays on developing a successful web application, is actually quite applicable to innovation in general. Essay topics include on how to focus on what’s important, how to determine which features are necessary, how to whittle down priorities (an stick to them), and even how to start the conceptual stage of your project. This is a must-read for any Brainstormer here, as well as for anyone who’s thinking about starting something new. Each essay is well-written, easy to read, and most importantly, interesting.

I really can’t say enough about this book. Check out the Table of Contents for yourself and read a few essays.

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Innovation Techniques, Innovation Training | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

I just saw a beautifully done video by a professor at Kansas State University that looks at the evolution of the internet. From an innovation perspective, you will notice how the world-wide-web as a collaborative product has responded to user needs. The speed at which the internet has evolved can certainly be attributed to the fact that the creative consumers of the “product” (the World Wide Web) have themselves helped evolve the product. This is Open Innovation in its purest form. Voice of the Customer not only being heard, but transforming into action by the customer to become co-creator of the innovative product, now known as Web 2.0. Fascinating!

No Comments | Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Many successful innovations today that spread like wild fire are ones that have helped people get out of their boring cubicle lives and become “mini-entrepreneurs” or more appropriately according to trendwatching.com, “mini-entrepreneurs“.

Just today I read a very well-thought and well-researched post on Web Worker’s Daily blog that talks about “10 new ways to make money online”. If you notice the innovations that led to the creation of this post, they are essentially leveraging the power of the internet to connect disjoint masses of people and help them transact with each other online. I think this type of “platform model” is a very well-proven and successful business model for innovations today.

The value of a company in a platform business model mainly comes from its active userbase and so does it competitiveness, as opposed to old school companies where the corporation’s competitiveness was valued looking at its technology or patents. Look at the following companies that are using the internet as a platform and how they make money:

• Google.com acts as the platform between advertisers and content publishers and charges a cut in the process.
• Ebay.com acts as the platform between sellers and buyers and charges a cut in the process.
• Kayak.com acts as the platform that aggregates sellers and helps buyers compare and find the best deals, of course getting an affiliate commission in the process.
• Elance.com, mturk.com, exchangehut.com, facebook.com … the list goes on and on

As the smart and successful young entrepreneur, Fabrice Grinda will tell you also as his criteria #2 for selecting a business, it helps to stick with a business model that is well understood and proven (not that you cannot create new business models, but few people and fewer corporations are willing to take that risk).

So, next time you’re brainstorming business ideas, think of how you can use the internet as a platform for connecting people and generating value in the process.

No Comments | Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Open Innovation, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this