Archive for category 08 Participative Customer
Towards a more socially integrated innovation process
Posted by jayvanzyl in 08 Participative Customer on July 8, 2010
Innovation processes come in various forms and shapes, but there is an overriding view that open innovation based approaches have simplified the concept. In some cases you need gates, funnels, check points, runways, pipelines, fuzzy front-ends, committees, review boards and other concepts to deliver on your innovation approach of choice. But, other times you need the process to be socialised, integrated and imbedded to deliver on your management mandate in a seamless way.
To drive this a process of Create, Rate, Collaborate and Review might just do the trick. Get people to participate through cycles of energy, then rank and rate what needs to be done socially, collaborate with various parts of the organization to get the job done; and finally find the successes and failures to either contribute, learn or avoid. Bring the shadow organization and the formal organization together by allowing ideas to flow freely, innovations to be implemented openly, and the benefits to be visible. Is this form of transparency paving the way for the future organization?
Some ramblings on crowdsourcing
Posted by jayvanzyl in 06 Age of Access, 08 Participative Customer on February 11, 2010
Two more examples of crowdsourcing approaches.
I’ve spoken quite a bit about innovation related communities and ecologies over the last months. One component that is needed to make innovations successful, is the ability to try and predict the future. Some predictions are described as scenarios and others can come from communities where the whole world participate in submitting predictions. The community, What the future holds plays to your need to leave a legacy where people in the future will see that you were able to predict the future.
Nostradamical: predict, publish, play “Essentially Nostradamical is a fun approach to a serious topic: The ability of ‘the crowd’ to predict events with better overall success than ‘the individual’.” The focus is on getting social communities to share information about the future. They are also working on a prediction engine that uses the data from the community to intelligently make predictions.
I find this particularly interesting as most of our clients would benefit from this approach when collecting complaints, recommendations, ideas, compliments, etc from their clients, staff, etc. We are entering an era where the classical MIS (management information system) approach is just not going to cut it. Real-time information is needed as crowds share ideas, change behaviours and shift markets. Integrating financial information from your bank, with tax information from the local authority, vehicle information from your car, mobile behavior from your cellphone, E-mail information from your E-mail provider, social information from your Facebook and Linkedin accounts… And, once integrated, you should be able to have recommendations made as to when to phone, where to drive, and what to do next for optimal performance. Is this taking it too far?
Here is another example, and something more practical…
We are embarking on a rethink of our brand, something that happens periodically. LogoTournament is a crowdsource based community where designers from all over the world can design logo’s for companies. It will cost you anything from about $250 to $5000 depending on the level of response required. So, why would you do this? The old way was to give your favorite agency a detailed brief, let them come up with something, and then you select an item. This is costly and everytime you want to change something it costs you money.
To crowdsource your design you need to provide the same kind of brief, and in some cases more detailed. You set the price tag and off you go. Designers from all over the world then submit their designs in pursuit of the relatively small fee for the design. Ranking systems are used to determine the kind of designs you like and don’t like. All of this happens interactively with a design community obsessed with making a name for themselves.
My take on the “The Myth of Crowdsourcing”
Posted by jayvanzyl in 05 Ecogenetic Changes, 08 Participative Customer on October 1, 2009
“Crowds don’t innovate–individuals do.” writes Dan Woods. Obviously, I think that Dan missed the point a bit as to what crowdsourcing really is!
Let’s look at the basics again:
“A crowd is a group of people. The crowd may have a common purpose or set of emotions, such as at a political rally, at a sports event, or during looting, or simply be made up of many people going about their business in a busy area (eg shopping).”
Crowds are groups of individuals with different backgrounds, preferences, opinions, skills, etc. What makes a crowd is when just one of these preferences coincide with preferences of others.
“Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call.” “Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions.”
The key is “sourcing” in crowdsourcing, it refers to the concept of getting groups of people access to potentially solve a problem. It is not that the “crowd” can solve anything; it is that an individual that is already influenced by being part of a movement or community now has access to a platform where the most appropriate solution will be accepted.
In the era of market segmentation we focused on segmenting markets based on behavior, gender, preferences, etc and then tried to solve problems for the segment in a generic way. Concepts like mass customization pushed concept of allowing a “market” to change some of the variances in the product/service based on individual preferences. Customerization is when the marketing messages and produced product or service are customized simultaneously based on individual preferences.
So, my take on crowdsourcing is; it is a platform for customerization where both the supply-side and demand-side of the value network in the economic setting participate in the extraction of value. Value in this case refers to economic and other forms of value for example reputation building, education, societal causes.
There is a relationship between crowds and tribes. Tribes is defined as “the term to refer to societies organized largely on the basis of kinship”. Crowds are formed based on common properties, and in most cases when crowds are formed inside companies it happens due to kinship; hence the relationship with tribes.
Let’s look at an example:
If you want to crowdsource ideas to develop a new business idea, you would need to firstly have access to a crowd. This crowd could be your immediate social network, or some other community where the individuals in the crowd have similar interests (and possibly only one common interest). You would need to present a “request for ideas” to the crowd where individuals will then decide (individually) if it is worth their while to participate. If the incentive is for immediate gain; where you pay money for great ideas, or if the incentive is long term; where you pay once the idea has been implemented will be different between various parties. As the crowdsourced ideas get submitted, the crowd will assist in determining if these ideas can contribute to the problem that’s being solved. This rating and ranking approach is now well adopted by eBay, Digg, etc where crowds express their views by voting en mass.
The ability to communicate and integrate ideas in society will continue to fascinate the human race. My take is that crowdsourcing related activity is an evolutionary phenomena on the way to have a more efficiently integrated human-technology decision making landscape. We are influenced by our peers, networks, friends, etc which are all crowds and we use technology to remove the inefficiencies of this influence.
A brief view on Idea and Innovation Management Software
Posted by jayvanzyl in 08 Participative Customer, 11 Information Epistasis, Technology Stuff on December 11, 2008
Idea management and the associated innovation processes to realize ideas are concepts now well implemented across many different global organizations. It is quite a cluttered landscape as organizations implement their own systems whilst others buy products. A few leading products have emerged with highly functional and comprehensive solutions. There is a shift in this landscape as these vendors try to capture SaaS (Software as a Service) value by offering various on-demand delivery options.
The SystemicLogic team is working on a report that will show the differences between these companies. An initial report should be available by January 2009. Consider this list of companies…
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Imginatik Qmarkets Hype ISDE Ideabox Brain bank Brightidea.com Mindmatters Technologies inc. Akiva Idea scale Ideamason Sopheon |
Kickstart Pro Accept software Planning innovation (power planning) IdeasTracker InPaqt Ideamanagement Axiom (Idearesevoir) Inventionmachine (goldfire) Inova Simplessus Strategyn |
Emergent idea ecologies
Posted by jayvanzyl in 04 Ecosystems, 08 Participative Customer on November 30, 2008
The use of community oriented idea management systems has emerged as the primary means of managing useful ideas from customers, employees, competitors, and any other networked member. Where is this leading? Have a look at these attempts to deal with idea management by organizations:
Starbucks uses this: “We know you’ve got ideas – big ideas, little ideas, maybe even totally revolutionary ideas – and we want to hear them all.”
BMW’s Virtual Innovation Agency uses a context setting mechanism to attract ideas. “If you have innovative solutions for our complex challenges, then you are on the right road with us.”
Dell uses IdeaStorm to elicit ideas from the public. “Where your ideas reign.”
SalesForce.com has Idea Exchange and uses it to obtain ideas and allow customers to interact with other customers’ ideas.
Cisco has their Human Network initiative; “When technology meets humanity on the human network, the way we work changes. The way we live changes. Everything changes.” For me this is the move towards the Human Mash-up.
Coca Cola has a number of concepts to elicit ideas from the public by allowing people to design their own bottles and other seasonal events by using on-line tooling. Check the Bottle Mash-up concept.
Lego has “Creator” where members of the public can ask questions, design their own units and upload digital design ideas. It is a window into the design world of Lego.
3M’s “YourIdea” is one approach used to obtain ideas from the public. Command products has its own idea capturing environment.
Apple also has a number of approaches, but the 
Learning Interchange stands out as a great community based initiative. Ideas collected during teaching (well before and after is also needed) can result in great new products, business ideas and a number of other positive side effects.
Idea based Wiki’s are also emerging. IdeasGrande 
is a project to get creatives and practitioners from the advertising and marketing industry to share ideas through an unstructured wiki.
Internally oriented idea management systems (in contrast to the examples above) are challenged as they try to capture many different dimensions in getting new thoughts, concepts, proposed opportunities, etc into the every discourse of business execution. There are a number of companies selling these types of technologies; but most implementations are challenged. Some key issues with traditional Idea Management Systems:
1. It becomes an administration nightmare. The more enthusiastic the organization the bigger the problem. Hundreds of ideas and only a few people to check, review, approve and re-direct ideas.
2. Volumes of ideas that have nothing to do with the business or its current challenges.
3. Dependence on specifically skilled people and a review process that is overly controlling.
4. Little- or no- follow-through on ideas to the individuals that participated in capturing ideas; resulting in damaging any further idea generation campaigns.
So, if these are some of the problems experienced inside organizations, how successful are idea management systems that include a wider and more diverse community.
What to do during tough times – Innovate, Collaborate OR Protect?
Posted by jay in 05 Ecogenetic Changes, 08 Participative Customer, Technology Stuff on October 22, 2008
Three bits of news seconds from each other got my attention today. You figure out what this means in light of these three Innovation Strategies:
1. Design based innovation – being focused on design and ecosystem based offerings
2. Open collaborative innovation – using information and the participative customers to entice the economic customer
3. Innovate though protective barriers – use legal systems and threat based tactics to protect your market
From ZDNet Tech Update:
Apple beats estimates; credits iPhone sales
“Apple beats estimates; credits iPhone sales Sam Diaz: It’s not the past performance that investors want to know about, it’s the future. What are companies doing to ride the economic storm? Yesterday, Apple reported fiscal fourth quarter earnings of $1.14 billion, on revenue of $7.9 billion. The company credited the strong quarter partly to iPhone sales. “We sold more phones than RIM,” CEO Steve Jobs said.
Other highlights from the quarter:
* The company sold 6.9 million iPhones, taking the company passed its goal of 10 million sold for 2008 – with two months left in the year. The company said iPhone is now 39 percent of the total business.
* Apple shipped 2.61 million Mac computers, a 21 percent increase over the year-ago quarter. It set a company record for a single quarter.
* More than 11 million iPods were sold, up eight percent from a year ago. The company said it was record for a non-holiday quarter. It’s market share for portable music players remained above the 70 percent mark.
* The iTunes store has more than 65 million active accounts and a catalog of 8.5 million titles. It has just added more television shows, renewed its content deal with NBC and added high-def programming.
* The company has $25 billion in cash and zero debt. In a call with analysts, Jobs hinted that the financial position gives the company the “ability to invest our way through this downturn.”
* The iPhone App store expects to see its 200 millionth application downloaded by tomorrow, 102 days since the July launch.”
From CNET Reviews:
The Android is here
If you managed to miss the hype, here’s some news: T-Mobile’s G1 phone, which runs Google’s Android mobile platform, is here. The phone might not be perfect, but Google’s Android platform has the potential to make smartphones more personal and powerful. We’ve got full coverage, including a full review of the G1 phone itself, the latest news on Google Android, and a speed test that pits the G1 against the iPhone 3G. Dig in!
* Coders get 70 percent of Android Market revenue
Google officially opened its Android Market Wednesday and promised that beginning next year, programmers will get the lion’s share of revenue from applications sold on the download site for the company’s mobile phone operating system. The first incarnation of the Android Market has more than 50 applications available
From DailyEdge:
Microsoft Flexes for Global Anti-Piracy Day
The selection of October 21 as Global Anti-Piracy Day may have been random, but Microsoft is tying its renewed emphasis on reducing the use of unlicensed and otherwise illegal software to the larger economic fears that businesses and end users alike are dealing with right now.
Anti-piracy numbers:
48: number of countries in which Microsoft is launching or relaunching anti-piracy education and enforcement actions today
5: number of continents on which those 48 countries can be found
20: number of resellers against which Microsoft announced legal action today, for allegedly selling pirated software
1/3: number of PCs globally, at minimum, that contain pirated, unlicensed or counterfeit software, according to Microsoft
$50 billion: Cost to businesses, globally, of pirated or unlicensed software in 2007
800-785-3448: telephone number customers can call to give Microsoft hot anti-piracy tips
120000: the number of open source projects actively working on solving this problem, Google is one of those companies with a few projects…
The relationship between the participative customer and economic customer
Posted by jay in 08 Participative Customer on April 19, 2008
The role of the customer has evolved where the act of co-production plays a more dominant role than in the previous era. This has been a slow journey that went through evolutionary cycles of change. It will be impossible to describe this journey in simple terms where you define a simple set of rules of this multi-dimensional evolution. But there are some signs…
This story starts after the industrial era – evidence that modern businesses are shaped around productivity and new business models. Productivity results in automation and business model innovation results in contemporary revenue models.
Business Models are described in “first order” and “second order” business models:
- The first order model is the easy model to define and the economic customer is well defined and becomes the focus of most business activity.
- The second order business model relies on the participative customer to drive economic value through a different set of customers.
Google makes money by having participative customers use their community for free. Well largely for free, services like Google Earth, Sketchup, Documents, Business have a “free option” and various payment options where you get additional services (a combination of first and second order models). Economic customers on the other hand pay to have access to participative customers – and this is where the advertising revenue model intersects with the services revenue model/s.
Neopets allow access to its vast gaming site to kids for free and then allow large brand organizations to create games. They sold immersive advertising models to companies that include General Mills, McDonalds. Mattel, Wrigley, Heinz, M&M Mars, Disney, Campbell Soup, Hershey, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Kraft Foods/Nabisco, Frito-Lay, and Lego, along with several entertainment clients.
Sellaband is a community site where a number of players share in the revenue that’s generated. Your efforts as a participative customer are rewarded economically. There are relationships formed to enhance the spread of customer networks. Sellaband and Amazon has a relationship that’s quite interesting.
…to be continued…
Time travel and our cognitive spherical existence
Posted by jay in 08 Participative Customer on March 16, 2008
I would like to address the issue of “time†again. Having done projects in strategy, innovation, organizational design, technology commercialization, etc I find that the concept of time is largely seen as a hidden factor. It is seen as a component that we can do nothing about and yet if we had to change our linear views to a view where we live in a time-space domain, we will have more success in achieving radical outcomes.
Lets bring it back to basics in relation to a current discourse. Client enlightenment can be seen as a strategic competitive attribute of any business. In order to achieve the ultimate in “service†levels you need to unpack the value constellation of the act of engaging with a client. If this act is repetitive, simple, and well defined; a human should not be doing the task in the first place. But on a different level; if the task requires a “personalityâ€, a different set of requirements are needed.
The time to perform a function can be seen a good measure if the task is automated, but if human touch is involved, the measure should be experience based. Companies forget that the dimension of experience is holistic and that time makes up a small component of the overall views formed by the client. Take the Disney experience; you are “wowed” by an all encompassing experience. You are really missing something if you have never been to a Disney Land/World.
Our ability to leverage the machine-only, human-machine assisted, and human-only dimensions of thinking can assist with determining breakthrough strategies in competitive behaviour. Look at Amazon.com, they won customer service awards without a human touch (I will look at their Mechanical Turk concept later). The focus is on self-enlightenment where the supplier of “experiences†focuses on the function, option and feature of the experience – where the dimension of time is removed all together and managed by the client on their own terms.
In describing a philosophy of delivery, look at these statements: customers must be enlightened OR we enlighten customers. The sentences look the same but the latter has a much more personal feel and focuses on a dimension that brings you closer to the act. The former is more of a procedure, or a statement of governance that might work well during defining non-client facing activity. It is about the emotion of how you then deliver the “statements of philosophy†in a way that time is only a dimension worth looking at if a closed-loop action is required. And yet, if we use statements like these and do not mention the time factor, does it really matter?
Using a spherical approach allows us to integrate time and space in such a way that the sphere around the client is covered with experiential tokens. It should be done in such a way that the time line is managed on an experience dimension. Would it be possible to have the world vividly documented in time-space-social information like Hypermedia Berlin? Prof Todd Presner, the creator of the concept, has this to say: “What if you could visit a city at any point in time, create a social network through time and space, and seamlessly interface between the past and the physical world of today?”. Can we record experiences about our customers in this way? Could “motion situations†help us describe a new form of existence in time and space (or time-space-social)? And then use this information to determine real-time feedback mechanisms to increase customer enlightenment?
Design for TIMELESS and enlighten through USE by understanding MOTION situations.
Seperating service lines from product lines
Posted by jay in 08 Participative Customer on March 10, 2008
I’ve been doing a lot of work in the field of “understanding business commonalities”. What are the key characteristics in a business process, or application technology, etc that can be used for purposes other then what they were designed for?
The notion of a service line can be used in a banking scenario for example: Banks sell credit cards. Actually they sell a credit card service. To be more specific, they sell a credit service that is delivered as a credit card offering where the piece of plastic is used as the evidence that you have access to this particular service.
So, if the bank sells many more credit card “products”, scaling the business is fairly easy as the infrastructure needs to run more instances.
Let me introduce another view for technology trending altogether – towards service lines as a focus. Technologies converge over time, but at some point there is a process of divergence whereby specialist implementations reign supreme. Check out this early view of a technology landscape.
Examples like Google (a recurring theme in my research) have interesting challenges, as they focus on convergence now during cycles of feature load to find the optimal mix of services that are sold as “on demand” applications. They compete based on a service line (for instance Google mail and Google docs compete directly with Microsoft?) where Microsoft focuses on product lines primarily (check Microsoft’s response to the Google deal at Cap Gemini). Office Live Workspace was just launched by Microsoft in response to the Google threat.
This is the abstract of a paper submitted to a recent academic conference: “Product Line concepts are widely used and adopted as Product Line Practices. The SEI/CMU has developed, together with a global community, a body of knowledge that encompasses a set of practices and patterns, that are used for software related product lines. How relevant are these practices to large financial services organizations that construct service oriented platforms? This paper presents some conceptual findings from research studies and implementation projects undertaken by SystemicLogic in South-African and Australian banks and insurance companies. We reason that a move towards Service Lines is needed to capture the benefits in service and more dynamic industries that do not develop software systems for deployment, but software for delivering on-demand process automation capability. The service line concept is outlined and some of the benefits and challenges discussed. The overall objective of this paper is to present some of the reasoning behind the development of service line practices.”
Architecture and the act of visualisation
Posted by jay in 08 Participative Customer on March 8, 2008
I’ve been working with Sketchup for a few months now and find that the product is set to transform our ability to visualize designs. It is available for free from Google. Check out the contemporary design of a south facing house…
Design principles include; maximum views, open and free movement, catching sun in mornings and afternoons, north facing light…The deck in front of the house will be on the edge of the cliff overlooking the water.
The act of design as an amateur can be used by a professional architect to shape the final architectural blueprint. Co-designing alleviate some of the pressures in not being able to explain things in text, or with crude drawings. If you want the original source document e-mail me or post a comment and I will send it off to you.
Business Model Emergence and the Open Source World
Posted by jay in 08 Participative Customer, 09 Economies of Scope on March 7, 2008
We are running the SystemicLogic Open Source Open Day event today. I’m reminder once again that the focus of Open Source Software is fragmented and misunderstood by many of our clients. The business models used by the various companies that create open source related software are under development and the scope of operation and commercial activity under scrutiny. Based on my recent (high-level) research, the following trend map was created; two major forces are influencing the open source world namely, category of competition and business ecosystem style. The following map presents some examples of open source examples (I will be discussion more products and business models over the coming months).
Competitive Category: Style of delivery and model used in the identification of ideas and development of overall software product. Traditional communities rely on a large following that support its cause.
Business Ecosystem: Open source companies rely on either donor based commercial assistance of designing business models that earn income via support and subscription models. Donor based business models rely on the market to contribute to the community, where commercial business models use a “community edition†version of software.
Where does all of this fit while Google works on Google docs and Google calendar? Can we remove all “running” software from the desktop and become virtual?
The Free Software Movement and Open Source Communities rely on some Free Love from time to time. I’ve found that the open source community is loaded with emotion and social movements.