While I’m between projects at the day job, I’m making use of the vast amount of free training that’s available on the web these days, in order to skill up on topics that will help me do a better job on the next project.
I found this one about collaborative product development on iTunes U.
The basic idea is that “lead” users build innovations they need or want based on existing products. These are things that the producing companies don’t know that people want; if told that they want them, they may even send the customers away, because they don’t know yet that there’s really a profitable demand, or they don’t even know how to produce the thing.
But talking to lead users helps to identify what are the unmet needs of your user community. They will also know who else (perhaps in a different field) is facing a similar problem and what they’re doing to solve it.
The smart thing for a company to do is partner with these users and make it easy for them to innovate and share their innovations – then support them in the core product. This creates great loyalty, to the point where the user community will actively protect the company’s interests, rather than trying to undermine them (as they’re likely to do if the company lawyers go all cease-and-desist).
A great solution is to provide a toolkit with which the users can design their own solutions to the problems they know they have (but the company doesn’t), and then assemble a product to their design and sell it to them.
The next step is to produce a flexible, customisable product that users can modify themselves “in the field” to fit their specialised needs. This captures a much larger market, including “markets of one,” and the producer doesn’t have to understand the individual problems in depth. They just have to know what is possible in terms of solutions, and make an abstracted toolkit that’s easy to use. This involves hiding everything the user doesn’t need to know in order to solve their problem, and leaving them only thinking about the things they know that the company doesn’t – thinking in terms they understand.
This toolkit should enable “trial and error” and feedback to help improve the solutions.
The professor uses engaging examples, ranging from skateboarding in empty swimming pools through kitesurfing, LEGO, computer chips, protein folding and Barbie Hairstyler. One of the projects he was involved in was as a consultant to 3M, and the products developed in consultation with “lead users” outperformed the ones developed in-house by a factor of 8.
What I’ve been trying to fit my brain around is how this could be used in writing and publishing. Obviously, smart publishing companies (if there were any) would be adopting some of the techniques that the indies have developed for marketing – romance writers are state of the art here, collaborating and sharing best practices, and they’re the big winners in the current publishing landscape. But could we also work with readers to discover the kinds of stories that they want that nobody is writing yet?
https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/how-to-develop-breakthrough/id674624937?mt=10