User Innovation

The User Innovation Revolution

A nice small on line book about user innovation revolution.

The work was contracted by UK national commerce council. The author of this book is Charles Leadbeater, whom I firstly heard from friend TM about distributed knowledge. Take a look at this short e-book, it's a good introduction to the user innovation and implication with business.

Following is a summary of the practices to profit from user innovations:

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?