Fast Company: Why you Should Look to Consumers for Product Innovation

 Published March 11th, 2013 by Fast Company

It has long been asserted (famously, by Steve Jobs) that customers can’t tell you what your next product should be. Companies create and customers consume. But the pace of innovation is increasing and customers are gaining access to new tools that democratize innovation. Customers are becoming a critical source of new ideas for brands. They are remixing existing products to make them better, more personalized, or adapting them to do new things. To be competitive, brands need to look outward and cultivate the communities of creative customers that are shaping the future of their products.

Here, we share five examples of creative customers that have remixed existing products in amazing ways:

Remixing iPod Headphones and Ziplock Bags: Lee Washington posted a video several years ago of an idea he had to make iPod headphones better. He recognized--as we all have--that earbuds have a nasty tendency to get tangled. He took a pair of headphones and prototyped a system, much like a ziplock bag, that allows you to lock the headphone cord together. It is a smart solution to an issue we have all been frustrated by. This was not a major consulting project, or the work of an internal R&D team. Lee Washington was a customer who loved Apple, but hated his earbuds getting tangled.

The InkJet Printer Turned Organ Printer: Inkjet printers have a basic purpose. But what if the same system in an Inkjet printer could be hacked and turned into a device that printed cells, or even human organs? In labs around the world, scientists saw that the inkjet technology could be applied to science in a very unique way. They retrofitted off-the-shelf inkjet printers and used them to print cells and human organs. Hundreds of scientific papers were published talking about the process of retrofitting basic inkjet printers to print cells. It is a revolutionary application to a simple consumer product inspired not by HP or Epson, but by creative researchers.

GoPro Camera Hacking: GoPro is an amazing tool that empowers customers to capture high-resolution video. The GoPro brand, in many ways has been defined by the videos, and art, its customers have created. But GoPro customers are also busy hacking and designing new mounts, audio inputs, and even connecting them to drones. Just YouTube "GoPro hack" and a stream of videos appear with consumers remixing the cameras to make them better or capture even more creative and inspiring shots. For example, look at this egg-timer video that turns an IKEA egg timer into an amazing panorama time lapse system. Their solutions may not be the most elegant of designs, but they are problem solving--and this should be a rich source of ideas and feedback for GoPro.

IKEA Hackers: Not everything needs to be tech to be remixed in creative ways. IKEA Hackers is an online community of people that have taken IKEA products and adapted them or mixed them together to create amazing new products. This hanging lamp created from office lamps is just one creation. IKEA Hackers is a world of creative applications and hacks and can be a window into new product ideas or adaptations of existing IKEA products.

Microsoft Kinect: The instant Microsoft’s Kinect system hit the market, people started taking it apart and adapting it for new uses. Customers designed a virtual dressing room, interactive billboards, and spatially aware robots. The core technology in the Kinect system became a set of tools consumers used to create innovations. Microsoft has embraced this movement, hosting Hackathons and creating an accelerator program for startups. The genius in this system is that Microsoft has armed its consumers with building blocks and created the infrastructure to catalyze and discover the various innovations and applications they come up with.

What does this all mean for consumer product brands?

Brands and legal teams will naturally fight these communities. Brands must champion a decision to cultivate and catalyze their most creative customers. Why? Because the smartest people are most likely outside the company, and by cultivating communities, brands can accelerate their pace of innovation while lowering risk and investments into ideas that have no roots in real consumer needs.

Innovation teams need to think beyond “what’s our next product” and start thinking about how they can create more open products that can be adapted and improved over time. Developers have been using APIs and open source software for many years to increase the pace of innovation. Consumer product companies can mimic these more open systems. Just look at companies like Sifteo or Lapka that have created physical products connected to software that are designed to be remixed into new applications.

Finally, companies need to catalyze and embrace the ideas of customers to drive brand affinity and authentic content creation. Every idea, hack, reinvention of a product tells a story. Crowdsourced ideas are a rich source of social content that can drive engagement. Opening brands up to ideas also has the benefit of activating social networks to think creatively about the brands they love. People embrace what they influence, so more open and transparent brands will become the most loved and talked about as well.

Fast Company: How Being Uncomfortable can be Your Best Creative Weapon.

Published February 22nd 2012 by Fast Company

Would it shock you if I told you that we’re ignoring our greatest creative resource every single day--even stifling it? What would you think if I told you that creative resource had nothing to do with what you do every day of your life?

For the sake of this article, let’s define creativity as the ability to solve problems in an unexpected or surprising way. Many of us may be in careers that are perceived as “creative": designers, developers, writers, or entrepreneurs. But we don’t force ourselves regularly to solve problems that are clearly out of our areas of expertise. That’s where we’re squandering our greatest creative resource. With routine, people tend to get stuck in patterned forms of thought. By forcing our minds out of our comfort zones, we can become a part of a more intellectually diverse crowd that helps us continue to learn and challenge our own assumptions.

This concept has been called a lot of things, but one of my favorites is “the curse of knowledge.” As Chip and Dan Heath wrote, when we attempt to problem-solve within our own boundaries of expertise, even within our own companies, we assume others know what we do. Nothing is more dangerous. We become incapable of communicating clearly to others, and end up with an idea that goes nowhere.

So, how do we get out of our own way? By challenging ourselves to feel uncomfortable regularly, to solve problems we never would in our day jobs, or to take on projects where we really have no idea what we’re doing. In other words, make that uncomfortable feeling your new hobby. Sounds a little crazy, but other people and companies have experimented with this with great success.

For example, our team worked with Jonathon Parker, an MD/PhD student, on a design project for audio systems. He got a chance to collaborate with a group of mechanical engineers, designers, and artists (individuals he would have never been able to work with in the medical field) on a short-term idea-generation project. Jonathon humbly told us that he learned so much from the group, but he also provided key input on how the brain responded to audio signals--information they wouldn’t have thought of without his expertise. In this particular project, “wisdom of crowds” took on a whole new meaning.

Parker is a modern-day Renaissance Man. It’s easier than most of us think to become Renaissance Men and Women, even if the capacity to do out-of-bounds things doesn’t exist within our day jobs. It seems as if once every few months I see a new workout program that promises results within 30, 15, even 5 minutes of exercise. While I can’t attest to how effective these programs are for the body, the brain can be exercised in similar increments to challenge patterned forms of thought.

The web has an incredible capacity to connect all different kinds of creative people to form communities of diverse thinkers. As people who desire a greater connection with creativity, we can seek out these communities to do things we’d never expect to do--design the next package for a consumer good, write a jingle for a national ad campaign, or even re-sequence protein enzymes.

On the other end, as companies seeking out sources of creativity, we no longer have to resort to expensive focus groups and studies to test out concepts, or even come up with those concepts in the first place. If the web truly becomes a destination for all sorts of Renaissance Thinkers to exercise their creativity, there’s an amazing untapped creative resource just waiting to be challenged.

So, welcome to the 21st Century Renaissance Community, where your grandmother is learning to code and your colleague in accounting is inspiring the next beverage flavor. What are you doing to make yourself feel uncomfortable today?