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.

Harvard Business Review: The Hidden Power of Mundane Ideas.

 Published April 25th 2012 by Harvard Business Review

Picture this: a nutrition scientist does a study with one person, limiting him to a 1500 calorie diet and having him run for 15 minutes on a treadmill each day. The man loses three pounds in a month. Can we safely assume that this experiment, when repeated with others, will produce the exact same result?

Of course not. So many factors — not the least of which include testing a larger, more diverse sample of people — contribute to the accuracy of any study.

The same holds true for consumer focus groups, innovation contests, and more recently the use of social media sites to solicit feedback from consumers. There's an unfair expectation that at the end of a survey or a campaign, we'll get "the answer" to something big from one magic interaction. Maybe we'll get the winning creative for a multi million-dollar ad campaign in a crowdsourced competition. Or the idea for our next product will hit like a lightning bolt on our Facebook wall, straight from the minds of one of our most loyal fans.

Sometimes we're lucky enough to get an amazing idea from an individual that changes everything, but more often than not, we're getting a collection of kind-of-similar, not-too-flashy ideas that should force us to question what we're doing (and find a way to do it better.) One of our mentors, ProfessorLaura Kornish from the University of Colorado at Boulder, has studied online consumer interactions with brands, like MyStarbucksIdea (a kind of online suggestion box for coffee fanatics). Her verdict: Sometimes it's far more valuable to find patterns in what people are requesting than to find that one, big "I never thought of that" idea.

Here's a slightly different example of this phenomenon in action. A large consumer electronics manufacturer we recently worked with had launched a new hybrid TV and internet technology focused on teens. They'd certainly done their homework. The company interviewed teens in focus groups before launching the product to find out which features to include in their new internet-enabled TV. The TV included many of the teens' suggestions, but didn't catch on in the mass market. Why not?

Building features based on direct feedback was certainly cool, but assumed a basic level of knowledge about teens that the brand hadn't yet mastered. We worked with a group of teens online with the goal of finding out how (if at all) teens see their TV and internet usage intersect. By far, this was the most popular recurring sentiment of the more than 2,400 submissions:

I often watch TV on my computer, but don't really want to browse the internet on my TV. 

These and a few of the other popular sentiments seemed so obvious, but were being overlooked by the brand in efforts to build the next innovative product. Sometimes, products are far ahead of their time because they assume a level of comfort that isn't yet there in the consumer. That's where the insights of the collective can be used to help us question everything. Maybe we don't need to surf Facebook on TV at all, but need to find a way for the big screen to interact seamlessly with the other four devices kids are using while they watch TV.

The same awareness of repeated customer sentiments applies to nearly any business. Sometimes changes can be obvious (a small restaurant gets 35 comment cards requesting a dessert menu, so they hire a pastry chef). Most of the time, we need to force ourselves to ask the right questions and brace ourselves for a thorough analysis of the mundane. That's often where the real innovation lies.