A few weeks ago a retail client asked us how user generated content could help develop new ideas and rate product and service improvements they have made. This got me thinking: should you be driven by your customers when innovating or should you rely on experts in the field?
Innovation is fascinating. The way in which teams arrive at new ideas and develop them into successful services, designs, products and trends are very different. Two models:
Customer Led & Qualified Innovation: This approach takes customer opinions and existing suggestions and prioritises them. A lot of recent technology has allowed new ways of generating and testing ideas, from phenomena such as crowdsourcing and multivariate testing to instant feedback through tools such twitter. This model has made companies like Salesforce.com successful, where they regularly get customers to vote on the product innovations real customers have proposed. This is not a new model, Hollywood has employed test screenings since 1919 to test, generate ideas and refine blockbuster movies.
Expert Led Innovation: This school of thought advocates hiring the best people in the business and ‘just going for it’. This is the Henry Ford school of thought. Brands like Apple are great examples of design innovation with little or no influence from the customer when innovating. To continue the film analogy, this would be and independent film director sticking to their vision and ignoring the feedback their given from initial screenings.
Both models work so how do you pick what’s best for your company. I posed this question to those clever innovators at Triiibes (thanks to fellow Triiibesters Igor Asselbergs, Steven Devijver, Sarah Farrugia, Stephen Snyder and Bonnie Larner for their thoughts) and began to form an initial view on which model should to pursue.
Pick customer led innovation when: there is clear customer demand for elements of your product and service that you can knowingly innovate on. Pick this model when your customers are informed and engaged in what you sell, where there is already a lot of differentiation in your offering or when you have a low toleration for perceived risk.
Pick expert led innovation when: there is a high degree of technical complexity in your marketplace, when your customers will pay for quality design, if you have a strong vision and long term plan, when you have access to great experts or when your core market changing rapidly.
So, while it’s clear that customer led innovation and feedback is important (as evidenced by the wealth of feedback received by Facebook everytime they update their user interface) there is still a place for expert led innovation in todays world. But as a number of the community at Triiibes pointed out, with innovation, “success is more likely if we're first or best at something”.
