gmtPLUS09 | live from Seoul

Another prime example of customer innovation and what makes good brands good.

Matt Haughey childhood, seen by Google Maps on Flickr

From my previous post Harnessing customer and lead-user innovation:
With the rise of online communities, together with the development of powerful and easy-to-use design tools, seems to be boosting the phenomenon, as well as bringing it to the attention of a wider audience, says Eric Von Hippel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is about to publish a book, “Democratizing Innovation” (MIT Press). “User innovation has always been around,” he says. “The difference is that people can no longer deny that it is happening.” Indeed, it is “very likely that the majority of innovation happens this way,” says Mr Von Hippel. Such innovation, he says, has a “much higher rate of success”.

Another point to weigh is what makes good brands good. Flickr and Google represent the few who do not try to dictate and control user activities especially those that are not covered in the “user manual”. If a customer has discovered ‘happy accidents’: new rich feature or tool that yields productivity, call it customer innovation.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 at 11:26 am and is filed under Innovation, Branding, User Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.