ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

In the hierarchy of customer research listening to your customers is probably the bottom rung of the ladder, the next step is watching what your customers do, and the third is seeing what they create. This is a model pioneered by well known customer research company Sonic Rim.

Out side of the context of research though, companies are increasingly giving their customers the tools to create right now, and therefore seeing what your customers create becomes just a part of doing business.

Here’s an article from Harvard Business Review on this exact topic, from 2002:
A Toolkit for Customer Innovation

I’ve pointed out in the past companies that do a great job of harnessing the creativity of their customers, netflix, ebay, amazon, flickr, google etc. As this continues to gain credence as a business strategy more and more companies are going to need to create environments that enable and support customer’s creativity and cultures and business processes that can actually take advantage of customer’s creativity.

I think one company that is suffering because it failed to take advantage of customer creativity is Tivo. It’s an example of a great product, supremely well designed, superior to almost every other product out there, but it failed to harness the passion and creativity of its user base to serve as a barrier to entry. I would propose that any network aware product that doesn’t take advantage of it’s network of customers, is putting itself at risk from competitors.