Innovating with remote customers
You are an innovator in a global corporation. Your customers are spread all over the world. How do you engage with them to come up with innovative solutions for their needs?
Of course, it’s best to work through colleagues that are located close to where the customer lives. But there are occasions where it’s hard to meet with customers, like those that live in remote geographies. Travel costs may limit the number of times you can run innovative ideas by those customers.
I recall an innovation session with about 30 global veterinary colleagues in the Netherlands. They had received the assignment to quickly come up with a few innovative solutions for farmers in 3 African countries. They had a very productive ideation session. Now they needed to get customer input.
It would have been very expensive and slow to test selected ideas with the farmers in those 3 countries by traveling over there. They came up with a simple, brilliant solution: connect live with those customers through a Skype video call. This allowed the innovators to get immediate customer feedback, test some key assumptions and iterate their solutions at very low cost.
Ideas that did not appeal “failed fast and cheap” . Lots of time, cost and energy was saved. Customer input was secured. Now the innovators could move quickly to the next phase: initiate a pilot to qualitatively validate the key assumptions of the most customer-relevant solutions.
As Dale Carnegie said:
“I am very fond of strawberries, but fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn’t bait the hook with strawberries. Rather, I dangled a worm in front of the fish.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I advised innovators to get customer input as early as possible, however difficult it might seem because of geographical, compliance or cost constraints. There are innovative solutions for most situations, like the one above.
More reading on this: To Get Employees to Empathize with Customers, Make Them Think Like Customers (thanks to innov8rs) and Embrace Your Inner Diva: Institutionalizing Patient-Centric Innovation (thanks to LifeScienceLeader)
More of these blogs? Click here: Wim Vandenhouweele
Any other innovative ways you have engaged customers? Please share below!