BQF Innovation

Customers are a great source of innovation. Asking your customers gives you incremental ideas. Observing your customers can give you radical ideas. An increasingly powerful third route is co-creating with your customers.

Threadless is a fashion company that’s had great success asking people to upload T-shirt designs that site visitors then rate each week. Winning submissions get printed in limited editions, and the creators are rewarded with $750 in cash and $250 in site credit. Those prizes aren’t going to make anyone rich, except maybe Threadless, which can freely reprint successful designs. But it does create opportunities. When the company’s founders needed to hire a graphic artist, they didn’t have to look far. Ross Zietz, a 24-year-old from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had won eight weekly contests. “They saw what I was capable of through my work for the competitions,” says Zietz, who had also been approached to design T-shirts by others who had seen his Threadless portfolio.

Converse, a division of Nike, has received more than 1,500 video submissions when it invited consumers to send in 24-second shorts inspired by Chuck Taylor shoes and the Converse brand. It has used 40 of the videos as TV spots, rewarding the creators with $10,000 each. More details on these stories can be found in an article by Yuvan Rosenberg for Fast Company.

Gerhard Gschwandtner develops this idea in the current issue of Selling Power. He describes an initiative at Doritos which invited consumers to create a 30-second commercial to sell Doritos. Online consumer voting in January 2007 will pick the winners. Five finalists will get $10,000 each. The Grand Prize winner’s commercial will be aired during the 2007 Super Bowl XLI.

Companies are exploiting the opportunities presented by the creative minds of their customers. For example, to celebrate its 150th anniversary, Timex conducted a global design competition: Timex2154: The Future of Time. Designers from 72 countries explored the future of personal and portable timekeeping and sent in 640 surprisingly creative entries. In the past, customers have been limited to communicating their wants and needs in surveys and focus groups; today, brands deploy existing technologies to map their customer’s imagination. Brands no longer view consumers as targets with a wallet, but as co-creators of exciting and profitable solutions.

Why not throw down a challenge to your customers to help design your next range of products or services? Set a competition and reward the most imaginative ideas. Use internet, video, chat room or other technologies to allow your clients to express themselves.

Paul Sloane

We often talk about Google being one of the most innovative companies. They are famous for allowing their people to spend up to 20% of their time on any project that interests them. Here is an interview from Time magazine with Google CEO Eric Schmidt in which he reveals some fascinating insights. First the emphasis that Google places on collaboration and secondly the use of questioning. ‘We run the company by questions, not by answers.’

Time Article

He talks about some of Google’s big questions and strategic challenges, ‘You ask it as a question, rather than a pithy answer, and that stimulates conversation. Out of the conversation comes innovation. Innovation is not something that I just wake up one day and say ‘I want to innovate.’ I think you get a better innovative culture if you ask it as a question.’