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Research > Customers.com Strategies > Customer Innovation

Customer Innovation Articles

Did you know that your most insightful, passionate, and smartest customers (and even non-customers) will volunteer their time and energy to help you develop products, services, business models, and streamlined business processes that will transform their lives. The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful, and cost effective, innovation processes.

Sample Article:

Bootstrapping Innovation
Leveraging the Collective IQ to Achieve Powerful Results

By Ronni Marshak

At our Spring 2010 Visionaries meeting, Christina Engelbart, executive director of the Doug Engelbart Institute and heir apparent to the visionary thinking of her father, Doug Engelbart, presented the concepts and action model for bootstrapping innovation. Christina has taken her father's considerable body of work to a whole new level, distilling the conceptual into an accessible, actionable strategy for Bootstrapping Innovation and Collective IQ.

Expanding and leveraging the Collective IQ of your people and putting them in the context of a Dynamic Knowledge Environment and a strategy and structure for increasing innovation empowers them to work together to solve complex problems, make smarter choices, and achieve more brilliant outcomes.

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Explore our Articles on Customer Innovation:

What Is Outside Innovation and What Tools and Technologies Can Help?


Introduction to Outside Innovation
The Outside Innovation Imperative

Democratizing Innovation
Von Hippel’s New Book Stresses the Importance of Innovation by Lead Users

Enabling Customer Co-Design
Using Customer Co-Design Tools and Innovation Toolkits

A Coordinated Game Plan for Business and IT Execs to Spur Outside Innovation
Five Initiatives to Support Customer Innovation

Apple’s Lessons for the Rest of Us
Customer-Led Innovation

Best Practices in Crowdsourcing
Leveraging the Wisdom of Crowds for Your Business

Foster Community
Strengthen Relationships and Help Customers Help Each Other

Online Customer Communities Are Strategic
Why We All Need to Build a Core Competency in Nurturing Customer

Help Customers Do Their Jobs
Become a Vital Resource in Helping Your Customers Achieve Their Outcomes

Customized, Built-to-Order Products
Solutions that Are Configured by Me and Built for Me

Google Wave
It’s "My" Design, but Will I Use It?

Google Android vs. Apple iPhone
Whose Application Ecosystem Will Win?

Green Infrastructure
If We Build It, Will They Use It?

How Visionary Customer-Centric Execs Keep Innovation Alive
Take-Aways from Patty’s Visionaries' Spring 2009 Meeting

What Are Visionary Customer-Centric Execs Thinking About?
Engaging with Customers to Innovate, Solve Problems, and Keep their Brands Focused on Customers' Goals

Bootstrapping Innovation
Leveraging the Collective IQ to Achieve Powerful Results


What Is Smart Customization and How Can It Work for Your Company?


Frameworks for Smart Customization
Guidelines from the MIT Smart Customization Seminar 2008

Smart Customization Comes of Age
Best Practices from the MIT Smart Customization Seminar 2008

Smart Transportation: Mobility-on-Demand
A Vision for CityCars and Smart Cities from MIT Media Lab's Smart Cities'

How American Power Conversion Streamlines Its Product Line and Offers More Customization
Best Practices from the MIT Smart Customization Seminar 2008

Mars Direct: Customized Candy Combats Commoditization
Best Practices from the MIT Smart Customization Seminar 2008

How Custom Product Design Can Spawn Customer-Centric Ecosystems
How National Semiconductor, CustoMax, and Zazzle Built Vibrant Ecosystems

Spreadshirt: Customers Want to Create Their Own Brands and Amplify Your Brand
Best Practices from the MIT Smart Customization Seminar 2008

How Keds Uses Zazzle's Customization
Best Practices from the MIT Smart Customization Seminar 2008

Tikatok: Kids Create and Publish Books
Smart Customization and Customer Co-Creation in Action


How Can Companies Thrive by Making It Easy for Customers to Create Their Own Innovations?


Amazon's Other Business: Cloud Computing
Why and How Is Amazon Web Services, LLC Shaping the Future of Web-Based Businesses?

AIP UniPHY: Creating a Professional Social Network
How the American Institute of Physics is Creating Value Add for its Members

National Instruments
A 30-Year History of Enabling Customer Innovation

Lego Mindstorms NXT
Powered by Customers’ Inventiveness

Zopa Case Study: How Zopa Is Creating a New Financial Services Exchange
Peer-to-Peer Lending and Borrowing for “Freeformers”

Koko Fitness
Discovering Baby Boomers’ Health and Fitness Issues

Outside Innovation at the BBC
Q&A with Matt Locke, Head of Innovation, BBC New Media

What Business Models Work in an Open Source World? Cohesive Financial Technologies
How a Software Start-Up Thinks through Its Options

Netflix.com Wins Patent on Business Methods
Turning Customers' Moments of Truth into a Sustainable Business Advantage

National Semiconductor’s New WEBENCH® Visualizer Raises the Bar
A Sophisticated, Yet Simple to Use, Web Dashboard

Nature Reinvents Textbooks
Scitable: A NextGen Ecosystem for Learning & Teaching Science

Local Motors
Reinventing the Car Industry from the Outside In

Moving from Cost Cutting to Customer-Contributed Innovation at Mentor Graphics
An Interview with Kim Kelley, Program Manager, Customer Support Marketing

Muji
Engaging Customers to Help with Product Design

Staples
Customers Help Bring a Customer Experience Promise to Life

Mozilla Firefox
Supporting Innovation and Choice by Moving Software to Open Source

Landscape Forms’ Use of GE ColorXpress® Services Customer Innovation Center for a New Product Launch
Launching a New Product Line Based on Customers’ Input

GE ColorXpress® Services
Helping Customers Design Differentiated Products

Asterisk and Digium
Shaking Up the Telecom Industry by Harnessing Customers’ Creativity

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How Ready Is Your Company to Support Outside Innovation?


Collaborating with Customers
Working Together Across Company Boundaries

Making Outside Innovation the “Path of Least Resistance” in Your Organization
A Blueprint for Harnessing Customer-Led Innovation

Customer Innovation Guide: Five Roles Your Customers Should Be Playing
How Engaged Are Your Customers in Shaping the Future of Your Business?

Customer Innovation Guide: Taking the 1st Step towards Customer-Led Innovation
Identify and Study Lead Customers

Customer Innovation Guide: Taking the 2nd Step towards Customer-Led Innovation
Provide Customers with Tools to Use to Reach Their Outcomes

Customer Innovation Guide: Taking the 3rd Step towards Customer-Led Innovation
Nurturing Customer Communities

Customer Innovation Guide: Taking the 4th Step towards Customer-Led Innovation
Empower Customers to Strut Their Stuff

Customer Innovation Guide: Taking the 5th Step towards Customer-Led Innovation
Open Up Your Products and Engage Customers in Peer Production

Customer Innovation Guide: Incorporating Story-Telling into Your Organization’s DNA
Mastering the First Core Competency

Customer Innovation Guide: Effective Community Building
Mastering the Second Core Competency

Customer Innovation Guide: Customer Co-Design
Mastering the Third Core Competency

Customer Innovation Guide: Opening Up Product Development
Mastering the Fourth Core Competency

Customer Innovation Guide: Leveraging Peer Production and Peer Promotion
Mastering the Fifth Core Competency: Leveraging Peer Production and Peer

Making Team Innovation Work
Learning from FIRST How to Inspire Inventors and Build an Innovative Culture

Give Customers Important Roles to Play in Shaping Your Business
Natural Behaviors You Can Tap to Unleash Customer Innovation



How Can Outside Innovation Foster Positive Changes in Third World Countries?


It Takes a Child to Raise a Village
How We Became Change Agents—Improving Our Families’ Incomes and Lives—and Role Models in Our Communities

Educating Kids to Be Change Agents
How the URDT Girls School Turns Girls and Their Families into Change Agents

Developing Change Agents to Spawn Grass Roots Innovation and Transformation in Africa
Lessons Learned from Rural Africa Could Apply to Your Organization!

Customer Co-Design in Rural Uganda
How URDT Empowers Grass Roots Creativity

Innovation in Education: School Children Improve Their Families' Livelihoods
At URDT, It Takes a Child to Raise a Village



Media and Publishing


Pandora: Delivering Personalized Internet Radio
How Pandora Internet Radio Combines Taxonomy, Crowdsourcing, and Personalization to Improve Music Playlists

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