Question

We have been talking about leaders, and chaos, and order, and innovation in general. Should the customer also be involved in the process? Sure it is very important to have leaders and employees on board and to also establish procedures to help promote a culture of innovation, but isn't the customer the end game?

What risk does an organization run if they leave the customer out of the process?

Answer 1

It is true that a customer is always both start and end game. In fact many firms have already started inviting their customer’s knowledge and competence to lead the innovative measures. Companies such as P&G, Microsoft and Cisco are prime examples of achieving success by capturing valuable insights shared by the customer.

There are many reasons for making it a new trend to involve customers in innovation efforts.

1)      An aware, well networked and active customer can easily challenge or contribute to the company’s traditional value model.

2)      The increasing uncertainty and dynamicity of the market making it ever more important for firms to utilize and take advantage of customers’ knowledge reserves. History has proven that an inward looking and closed system fails to sense the changing market and end up failing.

If managed and nurtured correctly, a firm which is customer driven in terms of innovations enjoys better competitive advantage from multitude of sources.

Risk associated with not engaging customers in innovation

1)      Customers are not always strategic leaders. Companies may fall in the trap of customer needs that are shared literally which provides an unfocused and unstructured need statement with no significant addition to the innovation efforts.

2)      There exist chances of companies getting bogged down while translating customers statements into a potential innovative solution.

3)      The managers communicating with customers may chose or ignore some or the

4)      Innovation and marketing managers may choose or ignore customer inputs based on their own level of understanding and belief system on what may or may not be important.

5)      Companies may also become overwhelmed or inundated with the inputs/ideas shared by the customers and fail to understand what aspect should be prioritized and given more importance what may be foregone.