If you’re marketing a bass guitar or an orchid or an electric SUV, why are you concerned with what everyone thinks about it?

It seems to me that you should only care about the opinion of those that are actually open to buying one.

Shun the non-believers.

Not the easiest, but the quickest:

Don’t demand authority.

Eagerly take responsibility.

Relentlessly give credit.

The parking meter was rebooting. I guess we’re supposed to walk to the other end of the garage and find one that’s working.

We’re seeing digital awareness coming to just about everything. In this case, it was the parking meter near the library. Of course, it’s not really a parking meter, it’s a centralized fee collection system that saves the town a lot of money. It’s easier to collect from, certainly, it doesn’t waste the time of meter readers (who get alerted as to what spaces aren’t paid for, as opposed to checking them all) plus it doesn’t let a new parker enjoy a few minutes of the last person’s payment.

I understand how the incremental sale of this device was easier to maket to the town and to the community. It’s just like what we have now, but better.

The problem, of course, is that it’s not as better as it could be. Just about every traditional non-digital solution is bounded by the limits of mechanics. Once we start connecting (and the connection revolution won’t rest until it’s all connected) then the problem can be reset–we can find the best solution, not a better way to solve it the old way.

Why do I have to guess how long I’m going to be parking? Why pay a penalty if I underguess, or waste community resources on patrolling for compliance?

Of course, I don’t care much about parking meters. I care a lot about using digital shadows of real world devices because we don’t have the imagination to reinvent them.

In this particular case: why bother have a meter at all? After all, the state knows my license plate, the state has a billing relationship with me, the state can (and does) collect money for my driving behaviors (like EZ Pass). So why not drive into the space and have the space just take care of all the paperwork and billing? No tickets, no meter readers. If you don’t want local merchants to park in the good spaces, no need to spend a lot of time searching them out…

Instinctually, we want to maintain the hunter/prey relationship of the independent citizen who isn’t being snooped on. But you know what? You’re already being snooped on, ceaselessly. A parking meter isn’t your problem.

Obviously, parking meters aren’t the important device here. The connection revolution is going to upend the way we understand the where, who, how much and when of everything around us.

Slices of co-created innovation excellence

I don’t think winners beat the competition because they work harder. And it’s not even clear that they win because they have more creativity. The secret, I think, is in understanding what matters.

It’s not obvious, and it changes. It changes by culture, by buyer, by product and even by the day of the week. But those that manage to capture the imagination, make sales and grow are doing it by perfecting the things that matter and ignoring the rest.

Both parts are difficult, particularly when you are surrounded by people who insist on fretting about and working on the stuff that makes no difference at all.

Intelligence is the combination of knowing a lot about a little while you also know a little about a lot.

Deep domain understanding helps you create analyses. Your ability to understand how a particular system (no matter how small) works allows you apply a confident analysis to new systems you encounter. Once you know everything there is to know about nuclear physics, soccer or the praying mantis, it makes it easier to understand new systems.

At the same time, it’s impossible to be smart without also being aware of the wider world. That’s because it’s the random interactions and the surprising coincidences that help us navigate our daily lives.

The challenge of the net is that it made the large world a whole lot larger. There are the personal lives of your 1000 closest friends, on display, every day. Here is the news of the world, the whole world, not just what used to fit in the newspaper. And over there is every book ever published, every scientific discovery, every fringe political candidate.

Suddenly, it’s a lot more difficult to know a little about a lot. It’s tempting to spend ever more time pursuing that goal. That doesn’t mean, I think, that you should give up knowing a lot about a little in order to devote ever more time to the noisy mosaic that’s on your doorstep, nor does it mean you ought to give up and dive back into your hole. We’ve redefined worldly, but being an expert remains just as tough and important as it used to be.

Bosch, one of the world's leading suppliers for (professional and personal) electronics and tools, has taken another interesting step in opening their innovation process. 

Bosch is not a new player in this field, already providing a general idea plattform where you can both submit solutions to specific problems and get the chance to send in and present your very own revolutionary idea for the next big product (enhancement). 

Now Bosch has taken things one step further. Seeing how automotive componentes and electronics are a major branch of their business they decided to go where problem-knowledge and improvement-ideas are most likely to be found: with the professional employer of Bosch's tool, the mechanic. 

In light of this realization, Bosch has recently launched the Bosch Open Innovation Plattform, specifically dedicated to professional garages and their employees. 

The concept of this community (which is so far in German language only) is twofold: The core-piece is a forum where professionals can discuss problems they may encounter during their work with Bosch's tools as well as exchange tips and tricks with colleagues from all over the nation (and the world, provided they understand German). Dedicated Bosch staff is also present on these forums so a direct interaction with company representatives is possible.

Next to this the plattform features an "Idea" section in which users (upon free registration) can submit their ideas about product enhancements and new solutions that they deem helpful/ necessary to better employ the company's products in "real life". Browsing through already submitted ideas is possible without registration. And of course you can submit ideas on how to improve the plattform itself (there even is an own section for this topic). 

A complementary "News" section is used by the company to transmit additional information deemed valuable for their target group. 

So far Bosch's concept seems to be rather successful with 400+ registered users and already 72 submitted ideas as of today, ranging from improved knowledge databases to concrete improvements of software provided by Bosch. It will be very interesting to observe where this communty of experts will go and which concrete outcomes it will produce. In any case a very good example of open innovation employment beyond "just" putting another idea website out there and wait. 

If you insist that they are wrong, they stop being your customer* (if given half a chance).

People spend their time and attention and money in places that make them feel valued.

*There’s nothing wrong with asking customers who are wrong to leave. Just be sure you do it on purpose.

For an author, one of the nicest parts of the traditional book is the dedication page. The dedication is far more than an acknowledgement to someone who helped you write the book, it’s a permanent signpost, a capstone to the work of a year or more.

Even if the person you’ve dedicated the book to can’t read it, the writer benefits from the knowledge that a connection was made and that a memory was preserved.

Here’s the thing: you can dedicate just about anything. A project, a meeting, a tweet. You don’t have to tell anyone but yourself. This blog post, like all the posts before it, has a dedication page, at least in my head.

When you start creating for and in honor of those that have made a difference to you, your work changes.

“Over there, by the fire, is that a stick or a snake?”

It turns out that humans have been naming things for a long time. If we know that this is a cheetah, or a grapefruit, we can make intelligent decisions on how to deal with it.

Lately, though, we’ve been naming more than things. Now we classify ideas and opportunities as well.

Getting smart about naming is at the heart of marketing. Calling every single person a ‘customer’, for example, is hardly a nuanced way of engaging with the public. Salespeople are especially nuanced at this, but often make mistakes as well. Car salesman are notorious for misnaming women who walk in (spouse instead of primary decision maker).

As an investor, are you misnaming the businesses you look at, mistaking a cliff business for a bootstrappable idea? Dozens of book editors misnamed Harry Potter at first glance, labeling it a ‘loser from the slush pile’ instead of the most profitable book they were ever offered.

Job interviews are nothing but sessions where we try to put a name on a stranger looking for employment. Is she a superstar in the making or someone we ought to avoid?

Most of all, are you misnaming opportunities and calling them risks instead?

When you are isolated or if the world is stable, your need to name new things goes down, and the world might feel safer as a result. Most of us don’t live in that world, so our ability to name things becomes critical.

Just because we’re not good at it doesn’t mean it’s not important.

It bothers me to watch the hordes at the farmer’s market, swooping in to each booth, grabbing a sample and walking away. The thin slices of handmade rye bread, or the perfect strawberries or the little glasses of juice–all of them disappear into the hands of people who have no intention of buying.

Sure, someone stops and buys now and then, which is why the farmers keep offering the samples. To them, it’s merely a cost of doing business, a relatively inexpensive way to keep prospective customers coming. I’m not sure I could do it–the people afraid to look me in the eye, all that slinking around, and most of all, the profits walking out the door, over and over again. Enough thin slices makes a loaf.

This is vexing, even to someone who merely makes ideas. Watching people sneak endless tastes with no intention of making a purchase–sometimes I gasp at the audacity.

The distinction in the digital world is profound. In the digital world, the more free samples you give away, the better you do. The miserly mindset that afflicts the merchant watching inventory walk out the door at the market is counterproductive in the digital world. That’s because more free samples cost you nothing.

The scarce resources in the connection revolution are connection, attention and trust, not molecules, atoms or strawberries.

Today I would like to inform you all about an intensive workshop that my colleagues Fabrizio Salvador and Martin Boehm as well as myself will be conducting at IE Business School in the beautiful city of Madrid, Spain. Three days dedicated to one of the most contributing factors in building and running a successful business: Putting the customer's desires first.  

Building a Customer-Centric Organization
Outperforming your Competition in Profitability 

June 18th – 20th, 2012
IE Business School, Madrid, Spain

Building a Customer-Centric Organization is a challenging three-day international executive program designed to help executives turn their customer's heterogeneous needs into an opportunity for value creation through the development of concrete capabilities applicable to any organizational setting by evaluating three fundamental aspects within their firms:

• Their customer base
• The state of their competition and 
• The technological capabilities and innovation mindset available to them.

The stagnation of consumption and the proliferation of highly heterogeneous and diverse customer needs are forcing executives today to refocus their product and service portfolios and respond to their client’s needs or risk losing them to the competition.

Yet, for any organization to be able to manage this changing dynamic all aspects of the business must be aligned with the goal of understanding customers, revamping their product and service offerings to match the target customer-value proposition, while redesigning organizational culture, incentives systems and processes accordingly.

Today’s executives must develop a holistic view of the principles around which organizations can redesign themselves to tap into the benefits of customer-centricity and gain insight into the issues and solutions associated to such vast organizational change processes.

Participants will develop a sound understanding of how to:

• Analyze the impact of customer centricity on revenues, profitability and growth. 
• Understand the organizational implications of customer-centric strategies and the changes that need to be made.
• Structure their organization by customer segments that establish ownership of the customer experience.
• Delight their customers by delivering value propositions that competitors cannot match.
• Achieve customer satisfaction by understanding and adapting to customer needs rapidly and efficiently.
• Identify and exploit all customer channels.
• Measure customer value for long-term profitability.
• Implement a customer-focused culture within their organization.
• Innovate by improving the value propositions offered to customers.

Additional information about this executive  program, a detailed schedule and all important registration data can be found on the workshop website (courtesy of IE Business School). I'm looking forward to discuss these challenging concepts with you in person in Madrid!

“Why?” is the most important question, not asked nearly enough.

Hint: “Because I said so,” is not a valid answer.

• Why does it work this way?
• Why is that our goal?
• Why did you say no?
• Why are we treating people differently?
• Why is this our policy?
• Why don’t we enter this market?
• Why did you change your mind?
• Why are we having this meeting?
• Why not?

Our German readers can find a German version of this post here.

Mobility is one of the key requirements for maintaining an independent lifestyle up until a high age. Today, most seniors are able to depend on themselves – as more than 90% of all 65-years olds live under their own roof in good health.

But what happens, when leaving home, to go shopping or to meet with friends, is getting increasingly difficult with a higher age? What if somebody’s mobility declines, even though he or she does not depend on help permanently?

A small daily help in such situations can be a walking frame. In Germany, there are almost two million walking frames in use, with a yearly selling rate of another 500.000 pieces. Unfortunately, not all of these are as fancy and safe as one would wish. Furthermore, German consumer goods testing agency Stiftung Warentest found insufficiencies regarding stability and safety of walking frames tested last year.

But what could the superstar of walking frames look like? It has to be handy and safe, yet also has to incorporate personal desires concerning the design and accessories to overcome it's still somewhat dusty image.

To find answers to these questions, German League of Seniors, in cooperation with partners from both the business and academic world and sponsored by the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, has initiated a large-scale idea contest to improve the famous walking aid. 

In the context of the idea contest “Stil:sicher unterwegs”, everybody with a personal or job-related affinity for design or technical problems is asked to give their input on how to improve the walking frame.

If you want to be on the team for developing completely new and innovative solutions for the walking frame of the future, here is your chance! May it be a GPS-assisted emergency notification system, an attached reading aid or a built-in minicomputer that helps to identify (individually) tolerable food: the only limit is your imagination. 

On the project homepage you can find more detailed information on the contest and the process of turning in your own ideas. Submissions are open until June 15th, 2012. You can also view and comment on already submitted ideas. Afterwards, a panel of experts will decide on the winning ideas which will be presented to interested companies and institutions and hopefully make it into future products. 

In my series of featured research on open innovation and mass customization, today I would like to present you a book (also availible as free downloadable pdf) published by my colleagues Volker Wittke and Heidemarie Hanekop (Goettingen University). They present an interdisciplinary view on the effects of broad (online) collaboration on innovation and production.

New Forms of Collaborative Innovation and Production on the Internet

By Volker Wittke and Heidemarie Hanekop (Editors)

Published byUniversitätsverlag Göttingen, 2011, ISBN 978-3-86395-020-0

Availible for free download and hardcover purchase at Universitätsverlag Göttingen

The Internet has enabled new forms of large-scale collaboration. Voluntary contributions by large numbers of users and co-producers lead to new forms of production and innovation, as seen in Wikipedia, open source software development, in social networks or on user-generated content platforms as well as in many firm-driven Web 2.0 services.

In their book, editors Volker Wittke and Heidemarie Hanekop take a nuanced look at the (online) collaboration landscape, presenting a collection of papers contributed by international scholars from sociology, management research, economics, and law. Complemented by a number of very interesting case studies, this book provides a good (academic) overview on the "big picture" of online-based collaboration in innovation and production.

Large-scale collaboration on the Internet is an intriguing phenomenon for scholarly debate because it challenges well established insights into the governance of economic action, the sources of innovation, the possibilities of collective action and the social, legal and technical preconditions for successful collaboration. Although contributions to the debate from various disciplines and fine-grained empirical studies already exist, there has been a lack of an interdisciplinary approach. This is exactly where this book provides great value — and as it is open access and free for download, it may serve as a good starting point for the debate.

Note: For more books on open innovation, co-creation, and corwdsourcing, head to the Knowledge Base of my website.

1. The first step is to stop Googling things like, “how to make money online.” Not because you shouldn’t want to make money online, but because the stuff you’re going to find by doing that is going to help you lose money online. Sort of like asking a casino owner how to make money in Vegas…
2. Don’t pay anyone for simple and proven instructions on how to achieve this goal. In particular, don’t pay anyone to teach you how to write or sell manuals or ebooks about how to make money online.
3. Get rich slow.
4. Focus on the scarce resource online: attention. If you try to invent a way to take cheap attention and turn it into cash, you will fail. The attention you want isn’t cheap, it’s difficult to get via SEO and it rarely scales. Instead, figure out how to earn expensive attention.
5. In addition to attention, focus on trust. Trust is even more scarce than attention.
6. Don’t worry so much about the ‘online’ part. Instead, figure out how to create value. The online part will take care of itself.
7. Don’t quit your day job. Start evenings and weekends and figure it out with small failures.
8. Build a public reputation. A good one, and be sure that you deserve it, and that it will hold up to scrutiny.
9. Obsessively specialize. No niche is too small if it’s yours.
10. Connect the disconnected.
11. Lead.
12. Build an online legacy that increases in value daily.
13. Make money offline. If you can figure out how to create value face to face, it’s a lot easier to figure out how to do the same digitally. The web isn’t magic, it’s merely efficient.
14. Become the best in the world at something that people value. Easier said than done, worth more than you might think.
15. Hang out with people who aren’t looking for shortcuts. Learn from them.
16. Fail. Fail often and fail cheaply. This is the very best gift the web has given to people who want to bootstrap their way into a new business.
17. Make money in the small and then relentlessly scale.
18. Don’t chase yesterday’s online fad.
19. Think big, act with intention and don’t get bogged down in personalities. If it’s not on your agenda, why are you wasting time on it?
20. Learn. Ceaselessly. Learn to code, to write persuasively, to understand new technologies, to bring out the best in your team, to find underused resources and to spot patterns.
21. This is not a zero sum game. The more you add to your community, the bigger your piece gets.

A few years ago I put my book The Bootstrapper’s Bible online for free. You can find it here.