• Blog
• Articles
• Books
• Training
• Consulting

Let Customers Co-Design Your Solutions and Strategy

• How Visionary Customer-Centric Execs Keep Innovation Alive

  Take-Aways from Patty’s Visionaries' Spring 2009 Meeting

  by Patricia Seybold

  How do Visionary Customer-centric Execs deal with the recession? By continuing to innovate!
  Jun. 18, 2009

  Strategies

  

• How Keds Uses Zazzle's Customization

  Best Practices from the MIT Smart Customization Seminar 2008

  by Patricia Seybold

  Keds is giving customers the ability to put their own designs on their sneakers by taking advantage of Zazzle.com. Zazzle is a customer-centric ecosystem that lets customers create their own designs to products and then buy or resell their creations.
  Jan. 8, 2009

  All Members

  

• Smart Customization Comes of Age

  Best Practices from the MIT Smart Customization Seminar 2008

  by Patricia Seybold

  Smart Customization, a profitable and sustainable implementation of mass customization, is gaining traction. The MIT Smart Customization Seminar, held November 2008, provided glimpses of what international practitioners have done and learned.
  Jan. 8, 2009

  Strategies

  

• Mars Direct: Customized Candy Combats Commoditization

  Best Practices from the MIT Smart Customization Seminar 2008

  by Patricia Seybold

  Learn how personalized M&Ms have led to a profitable new business model. Discover how Mars Direct became an innovative “personalized expressions” company within Mars. Mars Direct’s R&D Director, Dan Michael describes the journey to-date.
  Jan. 8, 2009

  Strategies

  

• How Adidas Moved to Smart Customization & Personalized Coaching

  A Journey from Mass-Produced to Smart Customization

  by Patricia Seybold

  Adidas pioneered in custom footwear and was an early leader in mass-customization. This brief case study describes the history of customization at Adidas from removable studs to just-in-time personalized coaching.
  Jan. 8, 2009

  All Members

  

• CustoMax: Platform & Ecosystem for Custom-Tailored Apparel

  A Journey from Mass-Produced to Smart Customization

  by Patricia Seybold

  CustoMax is a customer-centric ecosystem for made-to-fit mass-customized suits, apparel, and shoes.
  Jan. 8, 2009

  Strategies

  

• Spreadshirt: Customers Want to Create Their Own Brands and Amplify Your Brand

  Best Practices from the MIT Smart Customization Seminar 2008

  by Patricia Seybold

  Why do customers love to create their own T-Shirts? “If it’s not on a shirt, it didn’t happen,” says Jana Eggers, Spreadshirt’s CEO. Customers value the ability to create their own brands. They also love to personalize well-known brands.
  Jan. 8, 2009

  Strategies

  

• What Are Visionary Customer-Centric Execs Thinking About?

  Engaging with Customers to Innovate, Solve Problems, and Keep their Brands Focused on Customers' Goals

  by Patricia Seybold

  Patty’s Visionaries are the leading customer-centric executives who are transforming their companies (and their industries) from the outside in. This is an overview of some of the topics they discussed in their Spring 2008 meeting.
  Jun. 5, 2008

  Strategies

  

• Making Team Innovation Work

  Learning from FIRST How to Inspire Inventors and Build an Innovative Culture

  by Patricia Seybold

  FIRST’s annual world robotics championship inspires kids to work together while competing, and to come up with innovative solutions to difficult challenges. There are lessons to be learned on how to inspire adults to innovate and cooperate.
  Apr. 30, 2008

  All Members

  

• CohesiveFT Makes It Easy to “Roll Your Own” Virtual Servers

  Customer-Led Innovation in Virtualization, Service-Oriented Infrastructure and Cloud Computing

  by Patricia Seybold

  Cohesive Flexible Technologies is a software start-up whose story to-date provides six best practices in customer-led innovation.
  Mar. 20, 2008

  All Members

  

• Customer Innovation Guide: Core Competency 4

  Mastering the Fourth Core Competency: Opening Up Product Development

  by Patricia Seybold

  How far along are you in the Open Development Continuum? Do you empower, encourage, and reward customers for extending your products, coming up with new products, and sharing their solutions with others? See how you’re doing in this self-assessment guide.
  Aug. 30, 2007

  All Members

  

• Customer Innovation Guide: Core Competency 3

  Mastering the Third Core Competency: Customer Co-Design

  by Patricia Seybold

  Co-designing your company’s future with your customers is imperative to ensuring continuing innovation. See how far along your company is in taking advantage of customer co-design in this self-assessment guide.
  Jul. 12, 2007

  All Members

  

• Customer Innovation Guide: Core Competency 2

  Mastering the Second Core Competency: Effective Community Building

  by Patricia Seybold

  Customer communities are a bountiful source of innovative ideas and an excellent opportunity to create lasting relationships with your most loyal customers. But you have to do more than just set up a community and say “go.”
  Apr. 12, 2007

  All Members

  

• Publishing 2.0/Libraries 2.0: Students are Shaping the Future of Academic Publishing

  How Graduate Students Want to Interact with Information

  by Patricia Seybold

  How do professionals and students consume information in the Web 2.0 era? Three graduate students provide great insights into how digital information should be presented, organized, consumed and shared among professionals.
  Mar. 29, 2007

  All Members

  

• Digital Natives in the Classroom Are Propelling Us to School 2.0

  A Few of David Warlick’s Thoughts on How Kids and Web 2.0 Are Reshaping Education and Publishing

  by Patricia Seybold

  You’ve heard of “Web 2.0.” Now we have School 2.0. What can we learn about the future of education and educational publishing from long-time tech-educator, David Warlick?
  Mar. 21, 2007

  All Members

  

• Customer Innovation Guide: Taking the Fifth Step

  Open Up Your Products and Engage Customers in Peer Production

  by Patricia Seybold

  A key to innovation is to assume that customers will want to roll up their sleeves and customize your products and services to meet their needs. Make it easy for them to do so. Provide customization and configuration tools.
  Jan. 18, 2007

  All Members

  

• A Coordinated Game Plan for Business and IT Execs to Spur Outside Innovation

  Five Initiatives to Support Customer Innovation

  by Patricia Seybold

  To make rapid progress in enabling and empowering your customers to lead you toward new innovations, you need to coordinate your business strategy and your IT efforts.
  Jan. 11, 2007

  Strategies

  

• Customer Innovation Guide: Taking the Fourth Step

  Empower Customers to Strut Their Stuff

  by Patricia Seybold

  This guide provides a self assessment to see how far along your company is in empowering your customers to strut their stuff.
  Dec. 21, 2006

  All Members

  

• Customer Innovation Guide: Taking the Third Step

  Nurturing Customer Communities: The Key Third Step to Outside Innovation

  by Patricia Seybold

  Customer communities are key to fostering outside innovation. This guide provides a self-assessment to help you determine what your next steps in nurturing your customer communities should be.
  Nov. 22, 2006

  All Members

  

• Customer Innovation Guide: Taking the Second Step

  Provide Customers with Tools to Use to Reach Their Outcomes

  by Patricia Seybold

  This guide provides a self-assessment to see how far along your company is in making these tools available to your lead customers.
  Nov. 9, 2006

  All Members