Nice example here from Rob Lawton of how he helped the State of Missouri's revenue department reduce their customer tax refund turnaround time from 45 days to just 2 days, by switching from product-centred to customer-centred thinking and adapting one of their products accordingly. Try picking on one product of yours and reverse engineer it from the customer's point of view, as Robin describes here, and see what benefits you can achieve (may take a minute or two for the clip to load):

Labels: customer-centered, customer-centred, innovation, product development

Johnnie Moore spotted a little while ago a report on the PSFK blog on Virgin America's inaugural flight, which featured a number of innovations for passengers (as you'd expect).

I've been musing on this for a while, as what Virgin has done seems to me to take elements of Web 2.0 - in which the users take over the system and create an experience themselves - and apply it to World 2.0. In doing so, they've more than subtly changed the whole dynamics of passenger flying, particularly removing some of the passivity and powerlessness that goes with sitting in serried rows and waiting to be served.

The new Virgin America planes are wired to be interactive instead of for one-way communication. This is what allows the pasengers to at least partly take over the creation of their own flight experience.

The usual flight experience is, well, "Sit down and shut up", apart from when you want to get up for the loo, or to stretch your legs, or annoy the flight attendants by pressing the call button. Beyond that, your active participation in your own flight experience was limited to fiddling with the air jet above your head, adjusting your seat back a few inches one way or the other (and spilling the person behind's dinner in the process) and generally fidgeting around.

Until the arrival of the in-flight entertainment system, of course, when you could add to your activities fiddling with the headphones to get them to work, finding a music channel that works and trying to find a movie you hadn't watched before or that you would want to watch if you weren't held captive in your seat.

The new Virgin planes have taken passenger participation in co-creating the flight experience to a new level. There is a full querty keyboard for each seat, and it's wired for seat-to-seat chat. So, you can 'tap someone on the shoulder' (virtually) in the next aisle and five rows up if you want to chat with them (or chat them up).

You can choose from a 'movie on demand' system and select music downloads from the plane's 3,000 tunes. The next time you fly Virgin, the system remembers what music you like.

The interactive wiring will allow you to play multi-player games with people in other seats, with the screen in front of you doubling as a video console.

Instead of being served painfully slowly from a trolley as each individual transaction is accompanied by the search for the right change in that paper cup air stewards use as a till, you pay for refreshments by swiping your card in a card swipe in the back of the seat in front of you.

Instead of being woken up by the lights coming on at odd hours, the plane's lighting is programmed to mimic the time of day outside the plane, gradually fading and getting brighter, so that you can adjust to the time zone you are heading to.

The interactive airplane crept up on us a bit over the past few years. But, Virgin America just pushed it forwards into new territory.

I'm struggling a bit to explain the significance of this, but I think it's huge - This is internet technology being used to make a real world experience interactive and participatory. Web 2.0 doesn't just happen behind the screen on your desk. It's merging with our real world experiences to make World 2.0 .

Roland Piquepaille wrote tellingly about this a while ago with his 'Pigeon that blogs' story - no, it's not an allegory, it's an actual flock of pigeons that blog. They have atmospheric sampling sensors attached to them and air quality information they gather is relayed into the internet by radio transmitters. Piquepaille uses the phrase 'the internet of things' to help break us out of our faulty mental model in which the internet happens behind the computer screen and the real world is separate.

If you have customers and want to design their experience, you have to understand this merging of Web 2.0 and World 2.0 from the ground up - as Virgin did when they decided to completely rewire their planes to be interactive.

Labels: innovation, Virgin

“Ford is a bank

that uses cars

to sell finance packages

to its customers…”

Edward de Bono

“Ford is a bank”, de Bono famously said to the car giant’s Board to provoke them into thinking more creatively about their customer proposition, “that uses cars to sell finance packages to its customers.” This kind of lateral insight into how re-shape your customer proposition led to industrial giants such as GE setting up GE Capital Bank, to help customers finance their purchases. Finance arms now account for 50% or more of manufacturers’ and some retailers’ profitability.

There's another de Bono insight over in the Leadership blog that shows the value of re-thinking what your customer proposition is.

So, are you a bank? Or something else? I'll post something I heard Philip Kotler the marketing guru say a while back that may help you with this kind of radical reframing. You remember Kotler's famous 'Four Ps of Marketing'? Well, whether you do or not, they're old hat because they are supplier-centred rather than customer-centred.

Kotler realised this and translated them into 'The Four Cs' of marketing - each taking a customer perspective instead of a supplier perspective. Looking outside-in at your organization like that - just changing the language to change how you see your organization - is immensely powerful. I'll dig out the Kotler stuff and post it in a day or two so you can see what I mean.

In the meantime, I'll leave you to annoy your colleagues by asking them "Are we really a bank?" as a provocation. Er, don't do it if you ARE a bank, though. Actually, on second thoughts, do...

Labels: de Bono, innovation, outside-in

I heard Charles Dunstone, CEO of Carphone Warehouse, recently explain how texting is an accidental market - The text function on the phone wasn't intended for customer-to-customer communication. It was put on there so telecoms engineers could communicate with customers to keep them updated about fixes.

As your organisation comes up with all kinds of innovation processes for ‘industrialising’ innovation to keep ahead of customer wants, spare a thought for the role of randomness, as with these Things Discovered By Accident, from Fast Company magazine:

“The list of things created by accident is certainly impressive;

Aspirin,
Band-Aids,
Diners Club,
DNA finger printing,
dynamite,
inoculation,
jelly,
Lamborghini,
microwave ovens,
nylon,
penicillin,
velcro and
Vodafone.”

I’m not sure how 'Lamborghini' or even 'Vodafone'was discovered as an accident: “Oh, look, we dropped the molten metal and it’s formed itself into a 500 brakehorsepower car by accident. Let’s call it a Lamborghini Diablo!.” But, anyway…

As well as randomness, there’s the totally unexpected innovative opportunity if you watch how how customers use existing products. Gary Hamel, the strategy guru and a previous speaker at ecsw's European Conference on Customer Management, cites the example of the microwave manufacturer who put webcams in student dorms to see how the students used their product.

They discovered that their microwaves were being used by students to dry their pants after doing the laundry. And, yes, microwave clothes dryers are on the way as a result. Keep an eye on those customers: they’re a strange lot.

Labels: Hamel, innovation

Aha! I've just discovered my notes from an interview I did with Gary Hamel, the strategy expert, academic and author. I've been trying to find them to post this extract for you, as too much writing about innovation says it is about predicting, forecasting, inventing the future. No, it's not. It's about understanding the present more deeply than your competitors do. I loved the way Hamel explained it in this interview. It's a good way to start 2007...

"People who innovate successfully are not forecasters. They are in touch with what’s happening, whereas the competition simply haven’t noticed. People who innovate successfully don’t see the future. They see beneath the surface of the present. And they pull together what they see into a proposition that has instant appeal for customers, but which customers didn’t even know they wanted until it appeared.

"They’re not customer-led; they understand what customers want better than customers do themselves. So, how do you do this? Nokia are a great example. Fifteen years ago the top people at Nokia got together in a cold room just outside the Arctic Circle and decided they were going to beat Motorola. Very funny. Motorola was and still is one of the most respected companies in the world, up there with GE.

Nokia succeeded because they saw what was changing and exploited it. There are three steps to doing this:

1. Find the fringe

2. Look for the pattern

3. Data is not enough: Experience, feel and understand what’s happening.

It’s at the margin that you notice change happening first. Nokia sent its engineers from Finland and told them to live in places where exciting things were happening. They sent them to spend time in nightclubs in Tokyo, in the King’s Road in London, on Venice Beach in southern California. Their brief was to observe marginal trend-setting lifestyles and blend in, then report back.

It was that experiential learning, getting under the skin of the ‘now’ by actually living it rather than conducting a questionnaire, that brought Nokia’s engineers back to Finland with an emphasis on aesthetics and design and on more elegant, user-friendly interfaces. And that was how they did, indeed, beat Motorola in the phone handset market.”

Source: An interview between me and Gary Hamel.

Labels: Gary+Hamel, innovation, Nokia