Embracing User Innovation

The Fall edition of MIT's Sloan Review - titled "The Age of the Consumer-Innovator" - contains a number of articles on how consumers innovate to extend and enhance products they use to better suit their individual needs. A prominent researcher and author in the area of consumer (or user) innovation is MIT's Professor Eric von Hippel. A lot of Professor von Hippel's research is summarized in his e-book Democratizing Innovation, which is definitely worth reading. The book highlights research conducted with 3M that showed that innovations generated by users of 3M products were forecast to generate eight times more revenues than those innovations generated internally within 3M. Furthermore, these user innovations were more strategically important to 3M, had a higher probability of success, and provided a greater competitive differential than the internally generated innovations. All in all, a very compelling argument for embracing innovations that are generated by users. The real question is how can you do this? How can you tap into the inventiveness of your customer base and leverage their ideas and innovations to the betterment of your products?

According to von Hippel, one of the keys to embracing this user-led innovation is identifying your 'lead users'. Lead user is a term used by von Hippel to describe those users of your products who are on the leading edge of the market i.e.

"[Lead users] are ahead of the majority of users in their populations with respect to an important market trend, and they expect to gain relatively high benefits from a solution to the needs they have encountered there. The correlations found between innovation by users and lead user status are highly significant, and the effects are very large.

Since lead users are at the leading edge of the market with respect to important market trends, one can guess that many of the novel products they develop for their own use will appeal to other users too and so might provide the basis for products manufacturers would wish to commercialize."

Normally, lead users would be viewed as unrepresentative of the majority user base i.e. you build your product capabilities to appeal to the 'mainstream' users and not those on the leading (bleeding?) edge. Therefore, the requirements of the lead users are not wholly satisfied by the product - hence the desire for them to innovate and extend and enhance the products capabilities. No-one is suggesting that you change your product so that it meets the needs of the lead users and that you ignore the mainstream users (i.e. the bulk of your target market)...so how can you embrace and support the lead users?

von Hippel suggests that one of the best means to encourage and embrace lead user innovation is to actually allow and enable this to happen e.g.

• Many products are protected by patents and/or copyrights. While these patent and copyright restrictions are legitimate tools to protect the intellectual property of the product's manufacturer, they can also have the unintended consequence of inhibiting user innovations - especially if the manufacturer is very aggressive in patent and copyright enforcement. Having 'neutral' patent and copyright policies would allow IPR protection while not inhibiting user innovation.
• One means of avoiding copyright or patent infringement is to provide open interfaces to the products - whether software APIs or industry standard physical interfaces (such as USB interfaces for computer hardware). Making these interfaces open, documented and available to the lead users allows them to innovate without having to dismantle or reverse-engineer the product. It also provides a safe and supported interface to the product that can be controlled by the manufacturer.
• Creating and supporting 'innovation communities' is another way to embrace and enable user innovation. These communities can be as simple as a website or internet forum to allow users to exchange information and ideas. They can be more functional and include a file sharing capabilities or even a marketplace to allow the users to sell their innovations (more about this in another blog post). You can even arrange workshops or 'hackathons' for face-to-face interaction between users - for example, as an innovation track at a user conference. Enabling users to cooperate in this way further enhances and leverages their inventive nature and builds the notion of a community based around your products.

Supporting and creating the user community can help the manufacturer in other ways - it can increase the sense of collaboration between the users and the manufacturer so that the users feel that they are an integral part of the product development process rather than just a consumer of the completed thing. This, in turn, can increase the sense of loyalty and commitment to the product - something that most product manufacturers would love to have.