User-Driven Innovation
User-driven innovation is a hot topic. Many companies are starting to realize that innovation can arise not only from the Research & Development department but also from the interaction with partners, suppliers and customers.
Innovaro, an European consulting firm, released an interesting briefing around the subject. According to the article “all of the varied approaches to customer-centred innovation are seeking to gain greater focus around what are the true needs of target users and how can they best be met, or even exceeded, through the product or service being developed”.
The briefing also lists four main approaches to handle customer centred innovation:
Personas: involves the creation of fiction characters to guide our perception about customer’s future needs and wants. Through a combination of interviews and market research companies using this approach try to understand how products or technological concepts might fit into tomorrow’s context.
Ethnography: the basic idea is to observe customers when they are experiencing the product or service. This indirect method has some benefits because customers are not always able to express what kind of product they are looking for or what service would suit him best.
Fan Bases: this approach tries to identify and leverage the so called “lead users” to foster new product developments and innovation. Those customers are usually very participative and eager to engage into development communities. Participation can be generated through focus groups, online platforms, peer reviews and so on.
Participatory design: with this method customers are invited to participate directly in the product or service development. Companies can bring together designer, engineers, project managers and customers to form the development team.
You can read the full briefing clicking here.
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that fan is so cool. i wish i had one.
It appears that User-Driven Innovation may be combining various elements of Innovation derived from a pro-active, participatory User Community. I have tried to label this as: People Innovation, based on a good article on an upcoming book titled We-Think in Time Online
Also, another buzzword in Innovation is Co-Creation, which is perhaps analogous to Participatory Design.
For example, Doritos is using Co-Creation to literally create the best ever Super Bowl Commercial for their chips at the next year’s Super Bowl (2007).
Yeah there are many terms to define the same concept. Open innovation, user-driven innovation, lead user innovation… some authors might argue that they defer, but it all comes down to semantics.
[…] User-Driven Innovation […]
We have found that it is important to choose the “right” customers to ask your innovation questions. Simply getting an eager fan base involved will not always provide the right idea pool to use as a starting point or as stimuli for your product or marketing design teams. Check out some of the successful customer-driven open innovation work done by our company.
The key, as you will notice, is to arm yourself with quality research data, theright processes & tools, and interface with your most creative customers.
Anand, I just checked your site. Getting students involved in the innovation process is really a good idea. Students do no think under the corporate world constraints.
There is an difference between Open Innovation and User Innovation.
Open Innovation refers to “cluster innovation”, an cooperative environment of companies sharing knowledge ( patents, tech., workforce etc).
User innovation, refers to innovations developed by by end- users. Eric Von Hippel defined this as lead-users. If Hippel is considered to be the pioneer at this area, we could favorably stick to User Innovation and lead-users.
But, I agree, User-Driven Innovation is describing.
This is my correct blog-address, anyway
While discussing this subject related to User-participation and Interaction Desgin; Stanford is encouraging a really cool convergence between Engineering, MBA, and Desgin in order do drive Innovation. It is a really cool project called D-School.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/dschool/
I would like to recommend people interested in user innovation to check out brugerinnovation.dk the page contains:
-The latest research on user driven innovation
-A test for your organisations possibilities with user driven innovation
Free book’s and insightful video tutorials
You can contribute to the blog discussion and learn how to go about creating your user driven strategy
The motivation for focusing on user driven innovation originates from studying how organizations struggle with understanding the possibilities in user driven innovation (UDI).
BrugerInnovation.dk is designed to help organizations understand the change in the users’ perception of product value where users increasingly gain more product value from the surrounding aspects of the physical product.
Further an increasing amount of users obtain added value from being included, empowered and allowed to contribute, innovate and share.
Tjeck out brugerinnovation.dk (userinnovation.dk)
[…] User-Driven Innovation- User-driven innovation is a hot topic. Many companies are starting to realize that innovation can arise not only from the Research & Development department but also from the interaction with partners, suppliers and customers. […]
[…] Christopher Lettl höll ett inledningsföredrag om user-centered innovation på Utsikt 2007 i onsdags. […]
[…] User-driven innovation Innovation Zen blog, owned by Daniel Scocco, has a clear explanation about user-driven innovation. According to the blog, there are four approaches to implement user-driven innovation, i.e. (i) personas, (ii) ethnography, (iii) fan bases and (iv) participatory design. There is also a link to a briefing by Innovaro on the topic. […]