Patty Seybold’s New Book: Outside Innovation – A Call for Participation

First a little background on Patty’s Book, then the “call for participation”… For those that don’t know, Patty is CEO of PSGroup (my day job) and a best selling author. 

Outside Innovation

Patty’s book-in-progress is titled Outside Innovation. Outside Innovation is all about customer-led innovation, which Patty describes in her new blog  as “…the innovation that will keep you ahead of the curve forever”.

In Patty’s Early Book Fodder post she defines customer innovation as follows:

What is customer innovation? It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract customers to build a customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services. It’s big business. It’s inevitable. It’s scary. It’s exciting. It’s dangerous to your business if you’re not prepared.

For a point of clarity, when Patty says “customer”, she doesn’t limit the definition of customer to a person paying for a product or service. Customer also includes consumers of a product or service, such as people who search using Google, or readers of a public blog.

In a follow-up post she outlines 12 Roles Customers Play in Innovation:

• Builders—Build their products on top of your products
• Change Agents—Change your business models
• Co-Designers—Co-Design their/your business processes
• Contributors—Contribute their products, solutions, ratings, and intellectual property to other customers
• Collaborators—Build on other customers’ designs to create new designs/products and make them available to others
• Creators—Create their own new products with your help
• Customizers—Configure their own products
• Inventors—Invent new products for you to sell
• Market Makers—Play a key role in evolving the design of your market and/or ecosystem
• Problem Solvers—Solve each others’ problems
• Promoters—Select and promote products for you
• Providers—Provide their stuff for you to offer and sell

As is Patty’s practice, the book will interweave business theory and real world examples: case studies, anecdotes, best practices, and mistakes to avoid.

How You Can Participate

A. Provide Insight on Open Source Contribution, Projects and Benefits. An important area of customer-led innovation Patty will be exploring in the book (with an assist from me) is the open source movement. Our current thinking has us looking at open source from three perspectives: contributor, community/project, and broad software market effects. I think (at least) 6 of the customer innovation roles (above) apply: builders, contributors, collaborators, market makers, problem solvers, and promoters.

So, here’s your part…Since my readers are active in open source (contributors, consumers, suppliers) I’m hoping you can take some time to comment on any (or all) of the following. If you’d rather not comment publicly, send me an email: bmichelson at psgroup dot com.

My Questions for Readers:

1. What open source project(s) have you contributed to? What was your role? Why did you choose to contribute? What did you gain? What (if anything) did you lose?

2. What open source project(s) have you consumed? Was it for personal, enterprise IT, or commercial software development use? What did you gain? What did you lose?

3. What open source project(s) have a really good story as it relates to customer-led innovation?

4. What do you like/dislike about the ‘commercialization of open source’?

5. Anything else you'd like to share?

B. Check out Patty’s Outside Innovation Blog. Interact with her. As she states:

Give me your examples of customer-led innovation and customer co-design. Argue with my premises. Help me shape my next book. Become an active contributor!

But before you go over there, help me here! Thanks!

Comments

[James]

Several days ago, I attempted to post our own innovative efforts but got an interesting programming error after submission :-(

As far as answers to your question:

1. Liferay and ServiceMix. Role has been ensuring extreme scalability to 384 CPUs and being a mouthpiece for community projects. Gained knowledge in the practice of community formation and expanded horizon along with provided alternatives for enterprise.

3. Liferay has the absolute best story around customer-led innovation. No other project has a story around 100% open source for life. No other project supports valuable charities. No other project stands for traditional values. More than just code, both a political and social statement.

4. You really shouldn't have asked this question. The answer is somewhat obvious to those in the community. The answer lies in the simple fact that it is being misrepresented by both the media and the analyst community. They talk about open source products but not open source as an agile methodology nor encourage corporations that sustainability requires both giving and receiving.

5. Really would love for PSGroup to do a report on corporations whose business isn't technology and how they can contribute to open source along with case studies of those already doing it...

[brenda michelson]

James- Thanks for your answers. Re: #5, do you think there is a good "customer-led" innovation story, from an open source project that was incubated in an enterprise (non-technology business)? I might be stretching here...trying to get good ideas (case studies) for Patty's book, and cover your research suggestion. Let me know... -brenda

oh-on the PSG website error, Ray (our web guy) is on it. thanks for the heads-up.

[Mark Griffin]

Brenda,
#2-We have used JBoss, Apache and Linux in variety of roles within my company. JBoss primarily as prototype container for proof of concepts type projects with app servers. Its been very helpful because it is lightweight when compared to BEA and webSphere. Apache and Linux are more mainstream within the company. I also use Axis for doing interoperability testing with web services. Axis is embedded in a lot of software so its good to have around for testing.

I can also tell you had Sun/SeeBeyond been available in its current open source format, I would have look very hard at it from an EAI proof of concept. EAI vendors have very high costs. Lowering the entry level barrier is a big deal, especially during the proof of concept phase.

#4- I think this has been a good thing for open source. It certainly would not be enjoying the success it is enjoying if it were not for the ability to make money. Open source would still be around but with much less impact to the software world. The surge of startups centered on open source is just fueling the fire. And lets not forget the big vendors. Sun in particular. Sun's opening of Solaris 10 followed by the rest of its software product line will continue to have an impact on the other traditional vendors (I think).

#5-One thing I hear a lot when big vendors or just staff members in general speak of open source is the support question. Other than the obvious which is you can buy support contracts for all the commercial variations of open source products out there, open source support tends to be just as good if not better than what you pay for in support contracts. Open source developers tend to be pretty responsive and not walled off from the world. Traditional software support requires a lot of layers between the customer and the developer. The end result is rarely what you pay for.

markg
http://darth.homelinux.net