Quiz I - Supplemental Reading Material

Article "Putting Customers in the Wish Mode": What is the main idea of this article?

Ask customers to dream up their ideal product or service. Shift into "wish mode" by creating a wish list with a list of specifications. IDEA was the article's primary example. Customers were asked to create an ideal store on the premise that all IDEA stores were completely destroyed and that they needed to start from scratch. "Freeing customers to design their ideal product or experience resulted in a wealth of ideas that would otherwise have remained untapped."

Article "Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner": When are collaborative communities most useful and what's their purpose?

Aggregating a larger number of diverse contributions into a value-creating whole. Customer support communities; wikis; open-collaboration projects for information and software products with complementary assets inside the firm, FAQs

Article "The Customer-Centered Innovation Map": What are the three fundamental principles about customer jobs?

All jobs are processes (beginning, middle, & end), all jobs have a universal structure (defining what the job requires, identifying and locating needed inputs, preparing the components and physical environment, conforming that everything is ready, executing the task, etc), jobs are separate from solutions (make the job the focal point)

Article "The Age of the Consumer-Innovator": What are some ways companies can find or create "lead users"?

By creating or visiting consumer community websites or creating innovation contests to attract consumer activity that might not otherwise occur.

Article "Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner": What are the four distinct forms of crowdsourcing?

Contest, collaborative community, complementor, or labor market

Article "Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner": When are contests most useful and what's their purpose?

Contests generate high-value solutions to complex or novel problems through large-scale and diverse independent experimentation. For problems that would benefit from experimentation and multiple solutions. When the problem is complex or novel or has no established best-practice approaches. Highly challenging technical, analytical, and scientific problems; design problems; creative or aesthetic projects.

Article "The Customer-Centered Innovation Map": What are the 8 steps of mapping a customer job?

Define, locate, prepare, confirm, execute, monitor, modify, & conclude

Article "Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner": List some benefits of crowd-powered problem solving.

Diverse, large scale of ppl, personal incentive (desire to learn and reputation), cost-effective per output or per worker

Article "Putting Customers in the Wish Mode": What three things are the customers asked to not focus on?

Don't worry about expensive, level of difficulty to implement, and what they don't want (introduces negativity and restricts free-flowing interactions). Customers are to be encouraged to focus on what they want.

Article "Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner": When are labor markets most useful and what's their purpose?

Efficiently and flexibly matching talent to discrete tasks. Well-established categories of work that can be clearly described and evaluated; human computation; repeated tasks. Work when you know what kind of solution you are looking for and what an appropriate solver looks like.

Article "Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner": When are complementors most useful and what's their purpose?

Encouraging innovation solutions to users' many different problems with your core product. Open operational, product, or marketing data initiatives; content mashups; apps (i.e. iTunes)

Article "The Age of the Consumer-Innovator": What is the main idea of this article?

Explains why consumers are very important innovators who often develop products on their own. Consumers themselves are a major source of product innovations. It is getting easier for consumers to design and make what they want. Businesses need to organize their product development systems to efficiently accept and build upon prototypes developed by users.

Article "The House of Quality": What is the main idea of this article?

How marketing and engineering talk. The foundation of the house of quality is the belief that products should be designed to reflect customers' desires and tastes. It's a conceptual map that provides the means for interfunctional planning and communications. Companies must learn from customer experience and reconcile what they want with what engineers can reasonably build.

Article "An Anthropologist Walks into a Bar": What is sensemaking?

How people experience life. It illuminates the customer experience. Like Legos - "Start making Legos for people who like Legos for what Legos are."

Article "Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner": What is the main idea of this article?

Integrating crowdsouring into the corporate innovation tool kit. Article provides guidance on choosing the best form of crowdsourcing for a given situation.

Article "An Anthropologist Walks into a Bar": What does the human sciences approach do?

It examines the roots of customer behaviors - the complex interplay between their interior lives and their social, cultural, and physical worlds. It digs deep for insights that elude more-traditional business tools. Reveals the often subtle and unconscious motivations informing consumer behavior and can lead to insights that enable transformations in product development, organizational culture, and even corporate strategy.

Article "The Age of the Consumer-Innovator": Define the type of product innovation called "dimension of merit"?

It is an improvement to products with established functions and markets. This type of innovation improves an existing product function for which the market is known. Both producers and users may have an incentive to develop dimension of merit improvement innovations (i.e. better wheel bearings for skateboard).

Article "The Customer-Centered Innovation Map": What is the main idea of this article?

Job mapping by breaking down the task the customer wants done into a series of discrete process steps. By deconstructing a job from beginning to end, a company gains a complete view of all the points at which a customer might desire more help from a product or service. Job mapping gives companies a comprehensive framework with which to identify the metrics customers themselves use to measure success in executing a task. The goal is to identify what customers are trying to get done at every step.

Article "The Age of the Consumer-Innovator": Are consumer-innovators more or less educated than the average citizen?

MORE! Consumer-innovators are more likely to be highly educated, to have a technical education, and to be male.

Article "The Age of the Consumer-Innovator": What are the three phases of the consumer-innovation paradigm?

Phase 1 - Users develop new products for themselves Phase 2 - Other users evaluate and reject, or copy & improve Phase 3 - Producers enter when market potential is clear

Article "The Age of the Consumer-Innovator": Give another company benefit for adopting user-generated innovations as the basis for their commercial products?

Product prototyping and initial testing done in-house by their own company staff is very costly. Users shoulder those initial costs for their own reasons which saves the companies money and raises their success ratio by focusing on product concepts that consumers have already prototyped that are, to some extent, already market-tested as well.

Article "An Anthropologist Walks into a Bar": What are the five steps to the sensemaking process?

Reframe the problem (think of a problem as a phenomenon and examine the customer's perspective), collect the data (by having researchers engage in the lives of their subjects and identifying key themes underlying the phenomenon), look for patterns (structure the data to dive deeper into the subject's life by finding roof causes), create the key insights (ask "what are we missing" from the generated themes of the collected data), build the business impact (build innovation strategies by inventing new tech, manufacturing to develop new tools, marketing to create compelling stores, sales to sell a new type of product, etc)

Article "An Anthropologist Walks into a Bar": What does research reveal about what CEOs see as their biggest deficit in managing complexity?

Research reveals that CEOs see a lack of customer insight as their biggest deficit in managing complexity. CEOs wish to close the "complexity gap".

Article "The Age of the Consumer-Innovator": What are some ways to increase the attractiveness of a company's products to user-innovators?

Support user innovation by creating documented, open interfaces to support mods to products, explore to determine what users want in exchange for your benefiting from their innovations (create a win-win), give the innovators credit when the company decides to produce a commercial version of a user-developed product

Article "The Age of the Consumer-Innovator": What are some things that consumers need to realize regarding The New Innovation Paradigm?

That they are important developers of really novel products & services, it is getting progressively easier to design and make what they want for themselves, it is getting progressively easier to build what you design.

Article "The Age of the Consumer-Innovator": What is a "lead user"?

They are much more likely to develop commercially promising innovations that the average customer b/c they are both ahead of the majority of users with respect to an important market trend AND have a high incentive to innovate.

Article "The Age of the Consumer-Innovator": What does the article recommend to existing businesses?

They need to think about how to reorganize their product development systems to efficiently accept and build upon prototypes developed by users.

Article "The Customer-Centered Innovation Map": What is the goal of a job map?

To discover what the customer is trying to get done at different points in executing a job and what must happen at each juncture in order for the job to be carried out successfully.

Article "The Age of the Consumer-Innovator": What percentage of the countries' commercial R&D does each of the three countries spend individually on consumer-innovations?

UK consumers collectively spend 144% of their country's product R&D, US spends 33%, and Japan spends 13%.

Article "The Age of the Consumer-Innovator": What three countries were consumer innovation surveys conducted in?

UK, US, and Japan

Article "An Anthropologist Walks into a Bar": What is the main idea of this article?

Understanding how customers tick by observing them in their natural habitats by using a human-sciences-based process called sensemaking. Shift perspective from how the business perceives the problem to how customers perceive it.