Pretending to be a Customer

by Mike Brown

It's a challenge to objectively examine your own website as if a prospect or customer seeking information would. There's an approach you can follow to get ideas flowing though: Look at a direct competitor's online presence, trying to shoot holes in it based on how a customer might view it.

You should really be able to get into it by answering a few questions:

• What misleading or out-of-date information is presented?


• What's not compelling about the website?


• What's confusing about the navigation?


• How much unnecessary detail do I have to supply to get a copy of the "free" download?


• What questions do I have that the website doesn't answer?


• Do I know where to get my other questions answered?


• In what ways did I get smarter by browsing this website?


• In what ways were my information needs left wanting?

After doing this, go back and see how your own online presence compares. Looking at yourself from a customer perspective should now be much easier!


Editor's Note: When you're in a pinch (or without a research budget), you could also use this technique with employees (preferably new ones) for more than just web sites.


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Mike Brown is an award-winning marketer and strategist with extensive experience in research, strategy, branding, and sponsorship marketing. He's a frequent keynote presenter on innovation and authors Brainzooming!

Innovation Perspectives - Insights and Execution

This is the seventh of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'What is the most dangerous current misconception in innovation?'. Now, here is my perspective:

by Braden Kelley

For my money, the most dangerous misconception that leaders have is that coming up with a great idea is the key to innovation.

This is not the case. Insights and execution are the most important ingredients for creating innovation. As more industries become commodity battlegrounds, success will now be the driven by two key things:

1. The quality of the insights a company has identified to build ideas upon


2. The organization's ability to turn their insight-driven ideas into reality

As innovation moves front and center in an increasing number of companies and industries, the quality of insights and execution will separate the winners from the losers.

Apple moving into the phone business should not have surprised a single handset manufacturer out there. What competitive response did handset manufacturers expect as they introduced increasingly music-capable phones?

The idea of a phone that is also a music player is not, in and of itself, a differentiated idea capable of capturing the imagination of the consumer, and so the iPhone was not created with the goal in mind of creating a digital music player that is also a phone (though that was the strategic purpose for its creation). Apple needed a strategic response to protect their digital music player market from being disrupted by the mobile phone handset manufacturers.

But, Apple also knew that to be successful in an industry that they had no experience in, mobile phones, that they needed to introduce a truly differentiated and valuable offering. To achieve that goal, they needed a unique insight to build their ideas on of what a mobile phone should aspire to be.

The insight they chose to build their mobile phone business on, was the insight that people were now ready to make their computing experience more portable, while also at the same time making it more personal. The key idea built on this insight was that of the App Store. In building their phone around this insight, they were able to create a device that not only could play music (and help to protect their digital music player market from being disrupted), but could also perform just about any other function that a user might desire (or even imagine to build).

A lesser company would have endeavored to build the world's best music phone, but instead Apple realized that it was more important to build the world's most personal and customizable mobile phone (that happens to play music). This is the power of building around an insight instead of an idea.

Apple realized that the contracts with AT&T and the permission to do something like the App Store, along with building an application development platform that developers could rally around, were possibly even more important than the device itself.

One of the lesser known innovation truths is that a true innovation is often more than just a single idea, but is often several ideas coming together to serve a new key insight. Apple's insight was that computing was about to become more personal and move to the hand as part of this increasingly personal transition.

What insight will you build your business around?


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'What is the most dangerous current misconception in innovation?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Innovating with Task Unification and Social Media

by Drew Boyd

Embracing social media and the myriad of Web 2.0 tools is more challenging than just setting up a Facebook account or adding a "Follow Me on Twitter" link. Organizations struggle with how to take advantage of the power of Web 2.0. Where do you start? How do you tie these new tools in with your current website? How do you make sure your current constituents are happy while moving the organization to a more networked world?

For this month's LAB, we will use the innovation template called Task Unification, one of five templates of the corporate innovation method called S.I.T.. To use Task Unification, we take a component of a product, service, system, etc., and we assign an additional "job" to it. For this exercise involving Social Media, here is how it works. Imagine your company has a large base of employees in the field. For example, suppose your company has a large sales force or an extensive network of delivery or service people. Consider the U.S. Postal Service, for example, with an army of postal workers and letter carriers at over 32,000 post offices. A key question for these organizations like the USPS is: how do we get more value out of this fixed asset? Let's use Task Unification.

I start by visiting a site that inventories all the social web tools: GO2WEB20.NET. I randomly pick an application from this list. Then I assign the internal field resources to "use" this application to increase revenue/profits for the company. Using our example of the postal service, I create this statement: "Postal delivery staff have the additional 'job' of using XXXX (web application) to increase USPS performance." This is our Virtual Product in the S.I.T. method.

The key is to use the non-obvious applications for creating new, innovative services. You have to literally force yourself to imagine the corporate resource using the inherent aspects of the Web 2.0 application to create revenue or cut costs. Here are examples I created using Task Unification:

• ParkWhiz:


• "ParkWhiz helps people park their cars quickly and efficiently by providing them with the tools to make an informed decision. Instead of driving around to find parking, you can use ParkWhiz to get the best parking to suit your needs."


• Idea: The postal workers have a role to play by spotting empty parking spots and annotating this in real time using a mobile, GPS-enabled device to indicate the location of the open spot. Subscribers go online to see what parking spots might be available in their vicinity.


• Gist:


• "Gist helps you build stronger relationships by connecting the inbox to the web to provide business-critical information about the people and companies that matter most."


• Idea: Postal workers have a role of feeding information about traditional mail that is sent and received to your key contacts into the Gist system to help inform you about these contacts.


• Walkscore:


• "Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc."


• Idea: Post workers have the additional job of providing information about what to see or experience between any two walking points. The information is real-time, so it includes weather, crowd information, safety issues, etc.


• YowTrip:


• "YowTRIP is a social network site that connects you with other world travelers in your town or wherever you're traveling. Find people like yourself who are planning to or have traveled, live or have lived, anywhere in the world. YowTRIP's goal is to promote cultural exchange by connecting world travelers and enabling them to share their travel experiences on this online community."


• Idea: Postal workers have the additional role of collecting and reporting tourism-related information to the YowTrip system to inform tourists of local sightseeing opportunities.


• Orchestrate:


• "Orchestrate is an online workforce scheduling application that allows Operations Managers to schedule qualified personnel and tasks with ease. Features include qualification requirements for staff, locations, logins for managers, staff and clients, compliance reporting and visually beautiful schedules."
  
• Postal workers have the additional job of feeding in critical job site information into the Orchestrate system to allow better scheduling of crews and tasks.

Companies have an enormous stockpile of Web 2.0 business model ideas sitting and waiting to be leveraged. Their challenge is to take advantage of the discipline and structure of innovation templates to lead them to new, useful, and surprising opportunities.

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Drew Boyd is Director of Marketing Mastery for Johnson & Johnson (Ethicon Endo-Surgery division). He is also Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati and Executive Director of the MS-Marketing program. Follow him at www.innovationinpractice.com and at http://twitter.com/drewboyd

Future Is Not More Gadgets

by Idris Mootee

Future gadgets will do things such as enhanced cognitive assistance and collaborative filtering. And that gadget is probably your phone.


Japan is always the best place for new inspirations. My rental phone also acts as a translator and all I need is to point the built-in camera to any Japanese characters. It exchanges personal information that works like business cards. It also reads 3D barcode and gets me all the information that I need as long as they provide them. It is so popular here, from real estate agents to consumer package goods - even the Louis Vuitton store has them for their special collections. But what works here usually won't work elsewhere and vice versa in most cases. But one universal truth holds for the Japanese market as well as Europe or North Americas, people are simply not buying new gadgets, but actually trying to do things with them or getting jobs done. As technology advances as if there are no limits of they can do, there are tremendous gap exist between the potential of these gadgets (whether they are converging into cell phones of diverging into separate devices) versus the limited ways we use them today. We have yet to see how these gadgets will change the way we live, work and socialize.


Marketers are jumping into the bandwagon. MasterCard just launched their first corporate iPhone app. Using the theme of its well-known "Priceless" campaign Priceless Picks pairs GPS and 3D maps to show you local deals, dining, and other points of interest in your immediate vicinity. It allows you to soar around the map in quasi-street view or bird's-eye view, identifying locations as the color-coordinated bubble pops up. Red for dining, blue for shopping, orange for "Priceless" items, and so on. It is supposed to point you to interesting sources for wine sampling via vending machine or a local jazz club, etc. It is a cool app.


Best Buy understands the power of gadgets beyond gadgets. Shari Ballard EVP/Retail channel believes individual gadgets don't mean as much as marketers think they do. Instead, "we see tremendous opportunity around how those devices work with each other, and with content people already own," says Ballard, "People are trying to do things with their technology products, not just acquire them." Best Buy is looking at many ways it can bring those connections to the center of the store, in formats that are easy for consumers to see and touch. "There is major work to do in helping customers see what today is mostly invisible. Now, we describe these products with a lot of hand motions and 'imagine this.' We need a physical way for people to interact with invisible solutions."


The question is how we untangle the future of consumer (and social) technologies to uncover unarticulated, unmet or yet-to-exist customer needs? And in the process of untangling the future we will become more tangled up with more technologies driving new behavior that we cannot even imagine? What are the next practices to imagine these new behaviors? And how do we know if some of these behaviors will be ending up mainstream?



The future is not more gadgets, but more integrated and modular designs. We will see a wide variety of innovative tools and apps that will emerge to help us leverage the information glut to our benefit. These new devices, systems, and services will enable us to alleviate the symptoms of cognitive overload and compensate errors and weaknesses in everyday life human decision-making. Much like a pilot relies more and more on computers to fly planes, technologies will allow us all to become smarter.



They will come in all forms and functions including enhanced cognitive assistance and collaborative filtering, surface-based three dimensional data visualization and display, reputation-based recommendation systems, personal productivity improvement software, affordable context-aware devices, social software tools, and systems that leverage social intelligence.

This is a future that is happening fast. It is not something that will only happen in Japan, but around the world. Tens of billions of economic value will be created, are you in for it?

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Idris Mootee is the CEO of idea couture, a strategic innovation and experience design firm. He is the author of four books, tens of published articles, and a frequent speaker at business conferences and executive retreats.

An Internet Innovation

by Drew Boyd

Imagine a Web site that detects a visitor's "thinking" style and "morphs" its look and feel to suit that visitor's style? Professor Glen Urban and his colleagues at M.I.T. describe an approach in the Sloan Management Review article, "Morph the Web To Build Empathy, Trust and Sales."

They collaborated with BT Group, a UK telecom company, to create a Web site that learns whether a person is more analytical versus holistic, and whether the person is more visual versus verbal in how they process information. Once the Web site learns this (based on a few preliminary clicks on the site), it adapts itself to present information in an optimal way:



This is an excellent example of the Attribute Dependency Template, one of five templates in the Systematic Inventive Thinking method of innovation. Attribute Dependency takes internal and external attributes of a product or service and combines them to create new dependencies (or break existing dependencies). With Web site morphing, for example, the two attributes that have been linked are:

• Web site appearance (an internal attribute)


• Visitor's Cognitive Style (an external attribute)

Dependencies can be passive, active, or adaptive. Passive dependencies are static - they don't change once they have been established. Active dependencies are dynamic - an attribute changes only when another one changes. Adaptive dependencies change the way they change. In other words, they learn as they go. Attribute Dependency is a great tool for creating "smart" products - those that know and adapt to user preferences or environmental conditions.

Does Web site morphing work? The MIT researchers report that Web-originated purchase intentions for BT's broadband service could increase 20% after morphing the site to match individual cognitive styles.

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Drew Boyd is Director of Marketing Mastery for Johnson & Johnson (Ethicon Endo-Surgery division). He is also Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati and Executive Director of the MS-Marketing program. Follow him at www.innovationinpractice.com and at http://twitter.com/drewboyd

Social Innovation Camp II

I love to support causes like Social Innovation Camp by doing what I can to help raise their visibility.

Social Innovation Camp is an organization in the United Kingdom that selects and brings together social entrepreneurs with ideas to help the participants for an intense 48 hours to help move their ideas forward into web application prototypes. Check out the video:


Social Innovation Camp II, Dec 2008 from The People Speak on Vimeo.

To find out more about Social Innovation Camp, please go here.

What do you think?

@innovate