Service innovation through co-creation

Andrew Needham of Face has a really interesting article in October's Admap pointing out how some go-ahead consumer product companies like Unilever are using their customers to help them develop their products. There is a strand of thinking that customers and consumers don't really know what they want and if we always rely on them to tell us, we would never invent anything new. Like Henry Ford said, if he had asked customers what they wanted - they would just have asked for a faster horse. The advocates of this thinking (usually big-brand agencies) regard the only useful customer research is as crash test dummies - ie to test stuff after its been invented.

But it depends how you use the input from your customers and consumers and the way you deal with it. The Economist Intelligence Unit published a paper called The Digital Company 2013. They believe that customer-driven innovation will become mainstream by 2013.

If all this is true for product innovation then how much more real and important will customer co-creation be for service innovation? Services more than products are a series of interactions between the individual and the offering. It is continuous interface between the users of the service and the people providing it. So who is going to be better at deciding whether the experience was a good one or a bad one - the agency or the user? As the Design Council's RED Paper 02 says "A top down innovation strategy is no longer appropriate for solving today's complex problems". And this is even more so when you are solving today's complex service problems.

How you involve the user to co design the services they will use, and how you can get them to truly co innovate rather than just ask for a faster horse, is more to do with the techniques you use and the way you ask the questions. But the successful service companies will work out how to involve their customers and users and they will be the most innovative companies of the future.