Building the User-Driven Company

Hamburg.
The next speaker this morning at next09 is Lee Bryant from Headshift, whose interest is in user-driven companies. Such companies may engage in user-led product design or user-led innovation, for example, and much of their approach draws on the experience of the open source movement. But can we think beyond the 'user involvement' model, where user innovation takes place only on the surface? Examples for existing models, Lee suggests, include Digg as a totally user-driven environment, Dell's Ideastorm which draws in user ideas, and Walkers Chips' exercise in crowdsourcing new potato chips flavours - but even those remain to a large extent on the surface, and is not likely to be enough.

The traditional corporate model for user engagement has been mass production and customer relationship management (CRM), of course - whose model is essentially 'we do not value you or your call'. Companies have spent huge amounts of money just to annoy their customers, Lee suggests (by offshoring call centres and reducing the potential for face-to-face customer engagement - so any improvement here is welcome. (An alternative approach is VRM (vendor relationship management), in which the shoe is on the customer's foot - it's customers which are in charge of managing relationships with the companies they engage with.)

But times are changing: the financial downturn is exposing costly corporate models, and these are now no longer sustainable. Flat, responsive company structures are likely to succeed in this environment, and shared business models that involve customers in a meaningful way (think Threadless) look very promising. But for such models, what is the purpose of the company - is it the generation of sustainable income and status, or simply the plundering of customers' resources and the domination of the market? It is important to take the longer view - pillaging the market will severely undermine the company's social status. (Lee points to the history of the Hanseatic League here as a good example of a sustainable business model which did not aim to maximise profits at any cost.)

Perhaps there's a need to return to the idea of corporate organisations with a social mission - restoring an understanding of social responsibility which has all but disappeared from the corporate world in recent decades, in favour of plundering available resources. The current financial crisis is caused in good part by the failure to balance profit motives and social responsibilities, of course.

So, for a company to be user-driven, it must also be people-driven - and this needs to be represented not least also in the company's internal organisational structure. A company cannot just be soft on the outside, and hard on the inside; change for the better must start with the company's own employees - they must be allowed to be human, too, and to engage with customers. There must be consistant values throughout the business.

What, then, will the successful companies of the future look like? They'll need to be very keenly aware of the ecosystem within which they operate; they need to create a shared meaning and purpose; and they need to trust their network to be able to support them. Some of this is starting to happen externally, around companies - but crucially, it must also happen within them.

Technorati : business, corporate organisation, innovation, next09, produsage, user-led
Del.icio.us : business, corporate organisation, innovation, next09, produsage, user-led