More and more, customer-centricity is becoming a thing. As in, an increasingly important philosophy to companies in managing day-to-day and even longer term planning. In comes in different forms: design thinking, social CRM, service-dominant logic, value co-creation.
A lot of talk and interest around the concept of co-creation. It is no question that this is going to have lasting implications on how products and experiences are designed, developed and marketed. In 3-5 years, customer co-creation will be part of the norm of everyday business.
I’m a big fan of Business Model Generation and the Business Model Canvas. I find it rather useful in many situations to explain the essence of CRM Strategy, Customer Experience and the importance of the other building blocks to the blocks in the upper-right part of the Business Model Canvas.
I am pleased to announce that my new book, Flipped: How Bottom-Up Co-Creation is Replacing Top-Down Innovation is out. Well, it's not totally a new book. Doug Seibold, Eileen Johnson and the good folks at Agate Publishing suggested that we republish my 2004 book, Beyond the Brand. Both of us felt that the book needed to be updated and that the original title didn't really capture what the book was about. We decided to go back to the name I had initially proposed to my first publisher, Flipped.
A perspective of the firm as an autonomous knowledge creator that learns about customers and creates value for them is increasingly redundant. Now, firms are exploring alternative modes and building capabilities to co-create new knowledge and innovate superior and mutual value with their customers. Such a shift in assumptions about the value of customer-held knowledge has profound repercussions for how companies innovate as well as the nature of value itself. Some even argue that the very locus of innovation is slowly migrating from within to outside corporate boundaries and that this movement demands a new consideration of questions relating to how firms actively access and deploy the knowledge held by customers.
After the video of my presentation at Inverge 2 years ago has failed show up I have finally put an audio track on this presentation to provide a bit more context around my thinking and ideas. Amazingly, 2 years later the majority of the presentation still rings true and i believe the better companies can engage with customers in co-creation the more competitive they will be and the more meaning customers will derive out of these relationships.
Michael Porter popularized the idea and proposed generic strategies for organizations like Cost Leadership and Differentiation. Normally I’m not a fan of generic strategies as I don’t think they really lead to a sustainable advantage. IMHO most strategies should take such good use of your organizations talents, capabilities and resources that it should be virtually impossible to copy your strategy. In other words if you are worried about sharing your strategy with people because you think people might steel it, I’d suggest you find a new strategy.
Vitamin Water’s latest flavour, launching in March this year, was developed and named by the brand’s Facebook fans. The black cherry and lime flavoured drink will be called ‘Connect’ and one Facebook fan, Sarah from Illinois, won $5,000 for her role in developing this new product.
The waiting is over. Our new book “Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers” is now on the market. Yesterday we shipped over 1′000 pre-purchased books to more than 55 countries.
This blog reflects the personal opinions of individual contributors and does not represent the views of Futurelab, Futurelab's clients, or the contributors' respective employers or clients.
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