Co-Creation & Sharing with Your Customers

Here's what I love - when people much smarter than I am think the same things I think - only they say it a bit better. 

Strategy + Business has a great article, "My Customer, My Co-Innovator" by Michael Schrage:

In industry after industry, a shared model for innovation adoption is emerging. The most valuable “platforms” — the tools and technologies used internally to discover, design, and test new products and services — can be creatively and cost-effectively sold or lent to customers, clients, and prospects. Customers get a chance to “try before they buy.” They can adopt and test new ideas and technologies before investing in them. And the purveyors of new technologies rapidly gain insights into the potential value of their wares — insights that might otherwise take years to gather.

Schrage uses Cisco as an example:

“We’ve found that when we share our tools with customers rather than just demonstrate how much we’ve improved our technologies, we learn a lot more,” Randy Pond, Cisco senior vice president of operations, processes, and systems, told a Cisco CIO customer workshop in 2004. “Several of you have become true partners in design with us.”

And along the same lines, Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users writes another fantastic post,  "How We Treat Customers:  Before and After They Buy Our Products"-

If the best way to help create passionate users is by helping users learn and get better, then we should put our power to entice, motivate, and inspire someone to buy more, and use it to entice, motivate, and inspire someone to learn more. In the end, those passionate users will evangelize our product or service far more credibly and honestly than we can.

She's saying use the advertising money on stuff for your existing customers and they'll do your advertising for you.  I believe this completely.

Related Posts:  Customers in Charge, Ask Your Customers