What are your favourite books on leadership and innovation? Here is my recommended reading list. It contains books by Clayton Christensen, Gary Hamel, Geoffrey Moore, Peter Drucker, Edward de Bono, Jim Collins and others. When your friends and relatives ask what you want for Christmas refer them to this list. And please send me your suggestions and additions.
Paul Sloane
A great way to harness the collective creative power of your customers is to create an on-line community. Wikipedia created an innovative product – an online encyclopaedia – by garnering a community of contributors who built all the articles. It is an open source creation. All sorts of people post contributions and the community can organise, correct and manage itself – like some huge living organism. The content of the Wikipedia encyclopaedia may not be as accurate as conventional works but it makes up for that in its immediacy, accessibility and breadth.
Myspace fashioned a valuable and unorthodox product with a community for youngsters and their music. It became wildly popular with teenagers who enjoyed creating their own pages and listening to new and trendy bands. Youtube did something similar by allowing users to post their home made videos. It grew massively with hundreds of millions of visits per day as people shared cool and funny video clips. All of these sites and many more have benefited from user generated content. The site owner provides the structure but the users provide the content and the value. How can you do something similar for your stakeholders – whether customers, suppliers, or employees? Ask yourself these questions:
1. What shared interests or concerns do these people have?
2. What specialist knowledge would they be prepared to share?
3. How can we add value to the process?
Many organisations use blogs to approach these issues and that is a good starting point provided the blog gives value and impartiality rather than publicity and the company’s viewpoint. The next step is to create an online community which generates its own worth. The risk is that it cannot be controlled. The upsides are many – you will be seen as cool and helpful, it will attract new visitors to your area; it will generate a tremendous number of new ideas, concerns, issues and initiatives. Some of these could lead to suggestions for new products or services that you could offer. If you want a fruitful topic for a brainstorm meeting ask this – how can we create a community for our users?
Paul Sloane
I flew to France recently with BA. I checked in online at home on the morning of the flight. I printed my boarding pass at my printer and saved time at the airport. Not all 
airlines offer this service and those that do gain a competitive advantage. Anything that saves time, avoids queuing and makes flying less unpleasant is worth having. Checking in at home is a service innovation. Someone looked at the process and asked the question - how can we make it better? The answer was to break up the process and relocate part of it to a different place - the user’s home.
Have you renewed you car tax online? In Britain for years we have had to queue in a Post Office with our MOT certificate, insurance certificate and licence renewal form in order to get the licence that makes you legal. Now you can do it online from the luxury of your home. It is a public sector service innovation that is a real win/win. The DVLA saves money in administration and the user saves time and inconvenience. Once again the location of the service has been changed by using the internet.
If you provide services ask yourself these questions. ‘Can we relocate some or all of the service to make it more convenient to our customers?’ ‘Can we use the internet to provide our service differently?’ ‘Can we make life easier for our users?’ Remember that every service can be made better and customers love better service.
Paul Sloane
The next meeting of the BQF Innovation Unit will take
place on Monday November 26th from 4 to 6.30 pm at
the BQF offices in Westminster. The topic is the
innovation value chain - all the elements of generating
ideas, evaluating ideas, prototyping innovations and
then rolling out the successes. In small groups we
will explore which areas represent the weakest link in
the value chain in your organisation and what you can
do about it.
We have some room for non-members to attend but
we are limited to 40 delegates.