Innovation, marketing and the user experience 3 of 3 – Power to the People

[A word of explanation about the picture. The big circle shows a network analysis of users / customers and a cluster of marketeer / business valuer, technical innovator, and UX / service designer. The yellow arrows show the interactions between this cluster and lead users to enable co-creation. The background to the circle illustrates a customer journey with touchpoints, pain points and moments of truth. The normal linear format for a journey has been changed to circular, reflecting the blurring of product, services and service. Some version of crowdsourcing is in there somewhere. ]

So, we have had Part 1: Power to the Brand, and Part 2: Power to the Process.

This is now-ish, or really-quite-soon. The surrounding ecology is complex with Web, Innovation, Enterprise, Capitalism 2.0. The 3D printing presses are rolling (not literally of course).
Users and customers were never isolated, but now they can start interacting with each other about products and services  more than they ever used to. News travels far and fast – certainly bad news.  User expectations keep going higher (thank you, Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive).
Marketing has changed its focus to Value-In-Use, and  looks at Service, not services or products. Not surprisingly Value In Use has massive overlap with Quality In Use or ‘big’ usability.    Clay Christensen, in Milkshake Marketing, says that “It’s time for companies to look at products the way customers do: as a way to get a job done”
The User Experience (UX) / service designer  interacts with clusters as well as individuals, and understands the Typology of Crowds (Nicholas Carr).  People-watching becomes netnography.   HCD becomes subsumed into User-Centred Innovation. User participation becomes co-creation.
Technical innovation draws on a global network of partners.
Table-stakes for large and medium corporations have become a formal innovation programme with metrics, trained staff and an increasing spend profile.

Bringing together the viewpoints for technical innovation, a business value, and UX / service design looks to be the next challenge. Taking a data-centric view may be the way to crack this.

Lots of questions come to mind.  Can the viewpoints have a mutually understood set of success criteria? Can they use and trust each other’s data? Will the safety element in Quality In Use expand to link with Information Assurance? Can UX people help to put a monetary value on experience changes? Can purpose branding be made to work, and to link with technical innovation? Can business models evolve to support concurrent disruptive and sustaining innovation? Can organizations provide attractors that allow the silos between these viewpoints to dissolve? The working context looks web-based, but the richness of interaction required between participants really needs face to face interaction with sticky notes. How do we balance real-world and remote interaction?

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