Consumers have an active role to play in helping companies innovate and succeed says a new NCC report, The User Innovation Revolution.
Ideas and experience shared by communities of consumers are already benefiting some areas of industry by contributing to the development and effectiveness of new products and services, the report says. The mountain bike, the online Sims community and the NHS Expert Patient Programme are prime examples of successful consumer-led innovation.
Author Charles Leadbeater, believes mainstream companies have much to gain by unlocking the vast wealth of consumer creativity available in the economy. Involving groups of product and service users, eager to offer their input, can substantially cut the risks of product failure and help ensure goods adequately meet the needs of customers and business alike.
NCC chairman, Lord Witty says:
“Innovation has always been about how to look ahead to see what consumers will want or need. It is now possible to operate, not just close to, but alongside consumers in the process of innovation. As a result of this new partnership, the value of innovation can now be said to lie in the relationship that exists between business and consumers.”
The report’s consumer-innovator checklist (see attached) shows companies how to reach out to user groups, exchange ideas and create the settings in which new products and services can be tested.
Current areas of consumer-led innovation include the IT industry, where companies seek the views of users to develop software - the games industry, which relies heavily on user feedback, and the public sector, where users now play an integral part in the planning, design and control of their own services.
The report signals the need for government to update innovation policy - to take account of the fact that ideas now flow in both directions, and not just from companies down to consumers. This requires balanced intellectual property laws that encourage consumer-innovators by giving them the freedom to adapt and adjust products so they can contribute to the creativity and the accumulation of ideas.
Ends
Notes to editors
A copy of The User Innovation Revolution is available online at http://www.ncc.org.uk/publications/innovation_revolution.pdf or by contacting the press office.
About the National Consumer Council (NCC)
The NCC makes a practical difference to the lives of consumers around the UK, using its insight into consumer needs to advocate change. We work with public service providers, businesses and regulators, and our relationship with the Department of Trade and Industry – our main funder – gives us a strong connection within government. We conduct rigorous research and policy analysis to investigate key consumer issues, and use this to influence organisations and people that make change happen.
The User Innovation Revolution
Checklist for working with user-innovators
Those six rules of thumb can be read as a checklist organisations can use to think about user innovation:
Identify
- Have you segmented your customers by how much you learn from them?
- Have you explored the passions, pastime and hobbies of your staff to understand which of them are lead users of products and services you make?
Communicate
- What kinds of conversations do you have with users of your products to listen to and enlist their ideas?
- Are they conducted in your language and terminology or in the language of users?
- Who hosts these discussions: your company, the user-community or third parties?
- What can you do to facilitate and encourage collaboration among your users?
Remove barriers
- Is there professional resistance within your organisation to listening to user views and acting on them? If so how can you overcome this?
- Is it difficult to accommodate user innovations into your systems for making products or services? What can be done to make it easier?
- Do you have mechanisms to propagate valuable user innovations?
- Do you have a system to identify and manage the potential risks of user innovation?
Incentivise
- What incentives can you provide to users to encourage them to innovate?
- Can user-innovators get recognition from their peers? If not, how can you facilitate this?
Enable
- What tools can you provide user-innovators to help them innovate?
- What kind of intellectual property does your organisation control – software, protocols, tools, designs, music, film – that could be freely revealed to users to spark innovation from them?
- What training can you offer lead users to help them become more effective innovators?
- What spaces can you provide for lead users to prototype, experiment and test their innovations?
