Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company's Future

by Patricia B. Seybold

How dynamic businesses of every size can unleash innovation by inviting customers to co-design what they do and make.

Reading line: The 8 Roles Customers Play in Trend-Setting Companies

The refrain is familiar for Patricia Seybold in her journeys as a top technology and management strategist: I want our company to be acknowledged as the most admired and most customer-valued in our industry and to be recognized as the company that...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061135909
• ISBN13: 9780061135903
• Release Date: October 2006
• Publisher: Harper Business
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.4" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

innovation with customers

The book, `Outside Innovation' deals with co-designing led by customers. Even though many managers know how important it is to listen and observe customers, but they do not always carry it out. To make the company more profitable, managers have to know how to utilize customer's opinions: this is the main argument of Patrica B.Seybold. She is the author of ` and `The Customer Revolution'. She also founded `The Pactrica Seybold Group' which is based in Boston. By her broad knowledge and experience in this field, the book has rich contents and case studies: LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT, Flickr, and Wikipedia etc. School kids, math teacher, computer hackers, all of these groups are fans of Lego. Lego represents customer-led innovation. I'd like to point out that Lego is the company that produces toys but they also have various segments of customer. Regardless of age, jobs, customers like Lego. The company attracts different types of people who remain fans of the company. This is why Lego keeps interactions with their customers who lead trends and considers commercializing their opinions. The company also observes emerging audience such as adult hobbyist. This is the point. I believe that companies need to care about customers who are current and also the prospective ones to extend their segment group. Besides, Lego actively uses online community. A lot of business look at Lego as an example as to how to operate reader's understandings. In the second case study, the author suggests `Flickr'. This site offers the service that users can not only store and organize their photos but also show off in the Internet. Flickr is excellent at online business that is designed by customers who enjoy something creative like Lego. In this book, there are several comments of users who love Flickr. One of the users, Thom Watson told that "I'm amazed at how quickly Flickr staff make changes and fixes....". The site listens to user's advices that result from inconveniences when browsing the site. I think the advantage of online business is the swift feedback from customers. Flickr always tries to make uploading user pictures easiest and simplest. The book mainly describes practical study cases. Most of the examples are quiet specific and practical. Therefore, these case studies are complete enough to be applied to other companies' businesses. Every reader already knows about the importance of communication with customers. The author explains the detailed steps that managers take, adds the comments of current customers, and imagines customer scenarios for each case study. However, some of the companies that were used for case studies might not be familiar to every reader; there are not enough introductions of those. So I had to figure out those companies in the Internet to understand deeply; for example, Lego Mind storms NXT, and GE Color Xpress.

Become what your customers want you to be

The advent of the information age has truly empowered the customer and placed the end user in a power position regarding purchasing decisions. Their ability to comparison shop, raise customization and service expectations as well as demand lightening-like deliver of goods continues to cut into operating margins. To keep up, organizations are forced to innovate in the face of this ever-changing and growing demand base. Business author Patricia Seybold believes the continual tension between dynamic demand and shifting supply creates an opportunity for a concept that she calls Outside Innovation. In her book of the same title, Seybold defines Outside Innovation as a living process that harnesses the passion of customers and the vision of producers to generate truly collaborative solutions that optimally meet the needs of those vested parties. Soundview likes this book because it has the potential to shift the way business has typically been done by actively engaging customers in a variety of ways to help companies re-invent their procedures, products and ultimately their way of doing business. Companies that embrace the concept of consumer-led innovation are destined to thrive in any economic or competitive environment - this book can show you how.

A practical approach to incorporating the customers' voice

I didn't wholly enjoy this book but I enjoyed it on the whole. One third describes concepts of deep engagement and the intertwining of brand experience and customer experience and feedback, one third is a scrapbook of internet-driven or created businesses, and one third is a sales pitch for the author's consulting methodology. The first third I enjoyed, because exploring branding in the context of task-driven lead customers, and particularly the youth market, is an area which I have not found well articulated before. Seybold starts the job, doesn't go very deep in this aspect, but held my attention. Although if you're familiar with the Staples reinvention or what's happened at Lego in the last few years then you may not get much extra out of this part. Seybold explores categories of customers and how to engage and work with different groups in her inside-out innovation. I like her definitions of innovation, which is about creating wealth. Personally I didn't think that this was a ground-breaking work, it simply extends the business of working with your customers in the creation of your value propositions. For a consultant, it builds on the technique of working with your customer's customers. And we know that value is emotional and perceptual and personal, and the book frames those ideas back into the author's technique. That is all done well, it's useful, its important, and it is built on the back of lots of related work. The second one third is a compendium of reasonably well-known interent business success stories, and their customer interaction or "design" methods. It also has a big section on open source. If you're a business person who has not been engaged in studying these models, or is not familiar with the usual stories and open source, then you'll find this section worthwhile. It's the kind of Wikipedia story from free form to chaos to moderated-control that is one of the themes of this part of the book. My implication here is not entirely fair as there are some less commonly known cases that surprised me - such as the KoKo fitness machine which is an inspiring illustration of business development. The other what I call "one third" of the book is the constant punctuation of trademarked common words which pepper the exposition of the author's methodology and her showcase customers. That bit kind of annoys me, but objectively this methodology is well explained. There is nothing particularly new but it is nicely brought together as a process, and the author gives guidance and insights, and clearly with the right participants and motivation the methodology works well and has delivered good results. If you are on the lookout for a well explained approach, as either a consultant or an actual business operator, then you'll appreciate this component of the book. In summary - the book does a good job of motivating the understanding of customers co-designing your services and products, and brand image. However if you are already

Bridging between user/open innovation and mass customization

In "Outside Innovation", Patricia Seybold provides one of the first general-management books on co-creation of value between firms and customers. Her book is full of great and very up-to-date case studies that make the idea of value co-creation really lively and accessible. She describes (in great detail and with plenty of background information) many classic examples like Lego's co-development of the new Mindstorm toy, Threadless, Flickr, BBC Backstage or National Semiconductor, but has also some great new (at least for me) examples of customer-centric innovation like the development of a new fitness machine (Koko Fitness - great story and concept) or SEI Wealth Networks. And her pitch line why her book is important tackles one of the main problems of integrating customer and users in a firm's innovation process: The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes. The bad news is that many managers and executives don't yet believe in it. Today, that's their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall." I hope that her books can support more mangers to consider customer/user integration not only as a nice add-on pilot initiative, but to make it a crucial part of the company's core strategy. The book, however, offers no recipes or frameworks how a manager could do so. Its core contribution is to document and describe what is happening in a world that is not any longer dominated by companies creating things FOR users. And as Seybold does this in great detail and style, this record of promising practices may convince managers to turn away from old prejudices. Seybold uses the term "lead customer" to describe a group of a firm's current customers who are truly innovative: "These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about." My conclusion: A book very worthwhile to buy and read. Its great collection of case studies will inspire you to look for more and deeper information on this topic - or to start to brainstorm immediately how you can benefit from the creative potential of your customers.