How can you think differently, better and deeper, and create a
better future for yourself, your business, and the world?
Ideas are the new currency of success
The world is changing at a phenomenal pace. Seismic shifts are
transforming your markets - often invisible, but with immense
implications. New technologies, economics, fashion and culture
have transformed people’s expectations and dreams. Survival
and success requires you to explore places no business has
gone before, to be more curious and creative - to see things
differently, and think different things.
World renowned marketing and innovation expert, Peter Fisk
explains how to drive more radical innovation and defines the
nature of genius in today’s business world.
Start with the impossible,
then work out how to make it possible
Welcome to ―the Genius Lab‖, where inspiration meets perspiration,
with practical toolkits to find the best opportunities, connect insights
with ideas to develop more stretching concepts, and ensure the best
solutions have the most impact in their markets.
Learn from the strategies and processes of today’s most innovative
companies.
From life in the Googleplex, managing the people, projects and
portfolios that make the best innovations happen time after time, to
the creative rigour of Apple and El Bulli, Samsung and Threadless,
IDEO and Wieden+Kennedy – fusing deep insight with commercial
discipline to ensure that innovation delivers profitable growth.
Creativity in business comes in many forms.
Insights and ideas, brands and design, new products and services,
new experiences and business models ... Creative thinking and
disciplined innovation applied to everything you do.
From rockstars to graffiti artists, scientists and entrepreneurs –
Leonardo da Vinci to Alberto Alessi, Donna Karan and Burt Rutan,
John Maeda and Shigeru Miyamoto ...
Creative Genius inspires you to think bigger in today’s complex
world, and to ―stay crazy‖ in practical and profitable ways.
Be bold, be brave, be brilliant.
Genius = intelligence + imagination = extraordinary results
Extract from Track 23
Co-creation
Designing with customer ubuntu
From ―Customer Genius: Innovation from
the future back‖ by Peter Fisk
published in January 2011
―Co-creation‖ is the creative process of development done collaboratively with others. Whilst
these others could be other companies or individuals, employees or experts, the term is most
often associated with customers.
Lego Factory is a co-creation facility, physical and online, where consumers work with others,
and the building-block designers to build future products. Ducati’s Tech Cafe is where bikers
hang out and design the next generation of superbikes. IBM’s Innovation Centres are where
clients run facilitated innovation programmes, and Samsung has a Virtual Product Launch
Center where you can find the coolest newest devices.
Whilst some companies have hi-jacked the ―co-creation‖ word to redefine customer research
techniques such as focus groups and immersion, others recognise that it is a bigger approach,
engaging customers as partners in a journey from ideas to implementation
• Co-thinking. Working with customers to understand their needs and wants, but also to
develop new ideas and possibilities, using collaborative creativity techniques. This is similar to
―crowdsourcing‖, but more personal. P&G take consumers away to hotels for weekends, or go to
their kitchens, to explore better ways to do washing or cleaning.
• Co-designing. Problem-solving together, by better defining the issues and potential solutions,
maybe encouraging people to submit new designs both in terms of the business, and the style
of products in the way Threadless rewards the best submitted t-shirt designs, or Jones Soda
prints your photos on their bottle labels.
• Co-evaluating. Testing ideas with customers, building advance customer networks, getting
their feedback for improvement whilst also turning them into lead-user ambassadors. This
might involve extreme users, for example Nike working with elite athletes to evaluate new
shoes designs, or Gore working on new fabrics with emergency services.
• Co-developing. Customers can be as skilled and fanatical as your own technicians in being
able to develop better products, or specify better services. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner was
developed in partnership with customers, Nike ID design studio is at the heart of Niketown, and
IKEA ―allow‖ you to find your products in the warehouse, and build them yourself.
• Co-communicating. Customers can be your best, and more trusted, advocates. They might
write reviews on your website, or on other directory sites such as hotel customers on
Tripadvisor. They might even develop user-generated advertising for you, like made possible
with Scrmblr, and demonstrated by Converse’s social ads campaigns.
• Co-selling. People are much more likely to buy from friends and others like them, rather than
some anonymous salesman. ―Customer get customer‖ in return for a case of wine or iPod is
familiar to us all, as is the pyramid selling models championed by Avon and Oriflame, which has
even turned some of their most active customers into millionaires.
• Co-supporting. When something goes wrong, particularly when trying to use technological
devices, you need help and fast. User guides are gobbledegook, so you get online and ask other
users for help. Apple have utilised user communities to great effect, ensuring that you get an
answer to your question in minutes and in language which you actually understand.
This is a creative process, tapping into a diversity of customer backgrounds and utilising a
range of innovation techniques. It also needs to be carefully facilitated as it opens your business
to customers in a way they have never seen before, so professionalism and reputation still need
to be managed. It also helps you build relationships that no longer depend on direct mail or
loyalty cards.
And the best bit of all of this, is that customers will often give you all of this free.
Whilst tapping into the resources of passionate customers is cheap and often delivers better
results, customers will increasingly become aware of their value. Incentives and discounts are
increasingly expected in return, and the innovative co-creators will rethink business models in
order to share the longer-term rewards with customers, either through pricing strategies or
profit sharing.
Proctor & Gamble ... from product push to customer pull
AJ Lafley departed P&G at the end of 2009 after a remarkable decade of transformation at the
consumer goods business. The first thing Lafley told his managers when he stepped up to the
CEO job in 2000 was just what they wanted to hear: Focus on what you do well -- selling the
company's major brands such as Crest, Tide and Pampers -- instead of trying to develop the
next big innovation. Now, old staples of the P&G stable have done so well that they are again the
envy of the industry, whilst many new innovations not sit alongside them.
Back in 2000, Lafley, 23 years in P&G, wasn't supposed to be a radical change agent, he was
supposed to bring some stability back to the business. Having spent his early years managing
Tide, a decade running the Japanese business, he had recently returned to head up North
American operations. He recognized the need for change, the need for more speed and agility,
a deeper understanding of consumers, and a more radical approach to innovation.
In his time in charge, P&G has not only experienced transformation internally, but has absorbed
some of its largest competitors too - buying Clairol for $5 billion in 2001, followed by Wella $7
billion, and Gillette for a huge $54 billion in 2005. He has replaced at least half of his most
senior managers top 30 officers, and cut many more jobs as part of his vision to turn P&G into a
virtual brand-owning company, with brand building and innovation as its core business, with
much of the latter done in partnership with others.
Lafley’s initial rallying call was incredibly simple, almost embarrassingly so, as he reminds
people in meeting after meeting that ―the consumer is the boss‖. With this phrase he is turning
P&G inside out – or more precisely, outside in.
Symbolically he tore down the walls of the executive offices, including his own. He moved
people about, for example seating marketing and finance people together to drive faster, more
collaborative, more commercial, much customer-driven ways of working. He spent hours,
himself, talking to real consumers in their homes around the world - about how they live, how
they cook, how they clean. When his managers came to him with an idea, he was ready to
respond with a consumer’s mindset.
Innovation, in particular, has come under the microscope. Despite battalions of scientists and
engineers, P&G hadn’t delivered a real innovation in decades, despite millions of dotcom-style
dollars being pumped into internal ventures. When they tried to innovate, it was always based
on a technically-advanced product offer, rather than something consumers actually wanted.
Two major initiatives drove his innovation agenda – ―Connect and Develop‖, a co-creation
approach to developing new ideas with partners and consumers, and ―design thinking‖, using
those insights to create dramatically improved brand experiences.
―Connect and develop‖ started from Lafley’s goal that at least 50% of new products should come
from outside, compared to 10% when he began. This would require a huge culture change, from
a world where research scientists ruled, to one where ethnographers had the upper hand. The
new approach was also is about collaboration, with a diverse array of partners who had
specialist skills and perspectives which P&G didn’t, and couldn’t have internally.
The initiative is P&G’s version of open innovation – working in partnership with external expert
companies to access their ideas and capabilities, and equally those of consumers. It works in
both directions, inbound and outbound, and encompasses everything from trademarks to
packaging, marketing models to engineering, business services to retail partnerships. It started
with Lafley’s goal that at least 50% of new products should come from outside, compared to 10%
when he began. This would require a seismic culture change, and putting your future in the
hands of others would be risky too. The new approach is about collaboration, with partners who
have specialist skills, P&G doesn’t, and with consumers.
"Design thinking" has also become a core driver of P&G’s culture change under Lafley. Business
leaders have learnt to focus and listen, build and design – rather than order and control. Teams
work together rather than apart. The best ideas come from customer immersion not from the
research scientists. Business cases have been reduced to one page posters, rigorous evaluation
has been overtaken by rapid prototyping, and new products and services are rolling out like
never before.
"It has been transformative for our leadership teams," says Cindy Tripp, marketing director at
P&G Global Design, when describing her task implementing the company's new approach to
design-centred innovation to Business Week. Embracing 100 internal facilitators, more than 50
design thinking workshops are held in P&G business units across the globe each year. The
facilitators comes from every function at P&G, pushing the workshops to think beyond products,
and at least half the time is spent thinking about strategy, retail, operations and consumer
applications. People are encouraged to learn fast, and sometimes fail fast, every day.
.
Olayforyou.com is a new online beauty service. It provides a calming, easy way to receive a
professional beauty consultation without ever leaving your own home, all using intuitive
programming, based human-centred interface design. Through menu choices that indicate your
interests and skin issues, Olay is able to start a new type of dialogue while collecting important
data that can be more informative than expensive market research.
Design thinking was initially driven by VP Design, Claudia Kotchka who was asked by her then
CEO Lafley, to build design into the DNA of the company. At P&G this would normally result in a
complex, highly specified process but she knew that good design comes through attitude rather
than dictate. It needs a cultural pull rather than process push mechanism to work. At first people
wanted to know about the academic theory behind the process, which stifled thinking and
behaviours, but slowly they embraced the more experiential approach, engaging in problem-
solving rather than product-thinking became intuitive to them, as did the search for new
stimulus that led to creative solutions.
The resulting design thinking workshop structure became more of a fast-paced immersive
experience that ends with a serious reflection point about what's different using this
methodology. The main lesson was that people need to do design thinking rather than just think
about it. People who previously sat behind the safety of desks and lab benches were initially
scared to talk to real consumers, or to just build a prototype and try new ideas. But then by
doing it they found it worked. Indeed, counter intuitively, the less finished the prototype, the
more feedback it got.
Kotchka, writing in Front End Innovation believes that ―design thinking activates both sides of the
brain—it makes participants more creative, more empathetic toward the human condition P&G
consumers face. Our managers don't leave their analytical minds at home; instead they are able
to operate with their whole brain, not just the left hemisphere."
Net revenues have grown from $55 billion in 2005 to $79 billion in 2009, with 60% growth in
profits over the same period. Not only this, but 42% of P&G products now include an externally
sourced component. It seems that P&G, with the customer as its leader, and design thinking as
its discipline, is doing very well.
For more information, detailed contents and more
extracts from Creative Genius : Innovation from the
Future Back, the new book from Peter Fisk, go to
www.CreativeGeniusLive.com
To order your copy now at a special discount go to
www.wiley.com/go/genius
For more about author Peter Fisk, inspirational
speaker, and business advisor, go to his website
www.theGeniusWorks.com
www.CreativeGeniusLive.com