The excellent BusinessWeek Innovation blog has another posting about crowdsourcing. It’s bang-on in so much as it identifies that making the customer the starting point of the design process can yield significant and high margin returns.

Companies that “get it” and begin to integrate consumer input into the actual making of stuff and experiences will find enormous opportunites.

What is important – and what is missing – in the whole crowdsourcing idea, is a structured and methodical process. The use of ethnography coupled with the harnessing of customer generated product ideas sounds great and gets people excited, but in practise it’s expensive and time-consuming.

So how do you really use customer input to get a leap over your competitors? You start by reading “What Customers Want”

It outlines a very clear process for unleashing customer insights in such a way that the innovation process generates a set of very specific and very focussed design goals.

After being a part of many innovation exercises across a range of sectors, and designing innovation processes for design shops, Ulwicks approach is the only way I have seen which outlines an extremely clever way of demystifying the development of successful products.

If you want to be part of a wildly successful product design team, take a little trip to Amazon with your credit card and spend a couple of weeks digesting “What Customers Want.” It will be the best money you’ll spend.

The excellent Business Week design/innovation blog has a piece on Eric von Hippels thoery of user led innovation. If you don’t know the theory, it focuses on getting what von Hippel terms ‘lead users’ to generate new product/service ideas for you, based on the idea that as a ‘lead user’ they know the use – and intended use – of your product.

While this is a step in the right direction for many corporations there are a couple of issues :
1. It assumes that even within a strict framework users know your product best. At face value this may seem logical, but if you read Anthony Ulwicks thoughts on innovation you will see the flaws in this approach
2. It’s damn expensive, and probably prohibitively so for all but the largest companies (I wrote an article about how you combat this for the Stanford University d.School magazine which you can find here)

Read the Business Week post here