The Social Media MBA Blog by Karl Long

Sep 28, 2006

Book: Outside Innovation - How Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future

I was thrilled today to receive a book called Outside Innovation from Harper Collins to review today. Clearly this is not the review, that will come, but this is more an FYI that if you’re interested in this whole co-creation, social media, customer experience thing that this book should be on your list, period. It’s written by Patricia Seybold, founder of the Patricia Seybold group, and she is keeping up a pretty active blog called the Outside Innovation.

What is Outside 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 other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services. The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes. The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.

A quick look at the table of contents reveals a great selection of companies from that vary from social media companies like flickr and threadless, to more traditional companies/organizations like Staples, GE, Lego, and the American Institute of Physics.

I will read this with relish, and will post my review/thoughts on it later.

K