• Blog
• Articles
• Books
• Training
• Consulting

Crowdsourcing

• Business Week's Business Exchange

  A Good Example of Crowd Sourcing and Social Networking

  by Patricia Seybold

  Business Week’s Business Exchange is a crowdsourcing adjunct to Business Week. Readers post links to interesting articles and blog posts they’ve found on other publishers’ sites or written themselves. Business Exchange uses three best practices in social media.
  Apr. 29, 2009

  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

  

• B2B Firms Are Adopting Web 2.0

  How to Engage and Empower Business Customers Online

  by Patricia Seybold

  Our B2B use of Web 2.0 chalk talk provides “slideware” with commentary so that you can re-use the graphics, concepts, and overall presentation to educate others.
  Jan. 31, 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 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

  

• 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

  

• Outside Innovation (hardcover)

  How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company's Future

  by Patricia Seybold

  Outside Innovation provides businesses large and small with the strategies they need to let customers co-design their futures and lead them to success.
  Oct. 30, 2006

  Strategies

  

• Customer Innovation Guide: Identify and Study Lead Customers

  Have You Taken the First Step towards Customer-Led Innovation?

  by Patricia Seybold

  This guide provides a self-assessment to see how far along your company is in the important first step towards customer-led innovation by identifying, interviewing, and engaging with your lead customers.
  Oct. 19, 2006

  All Members

  

• Customer Innovation Guide: Five Roles Your Customers Should Be Playing

  How Engaged Are Your Customers in Shaping the Future of Your Business?

  by Patricia Seybold

  This guide explores the five different roles that customers can play and companies can leverage to become an outside innovation organization.
  Oct. 11, 2006

  All Members

  

• Asterisk and Digium

  Shaking Up the Telecom Industry by Harnessing Customers’ Creativity

  by Patricia Seybold

  The Digium/Asterisk story provides a good example of one way to build a viable for-profit business leveraging the open-source model while fostering customer-led innovation.
  Aug. 31, 2006

  Strategies

  

• Customized, Built-to-Order Products

  Solutions that Are Configured by Me and Built for Me

  by Patricia Seybold

  When you enable mass customization, you’re designing all of your product development and manufacturing processes from the customers’ point of view—from the outside in.
  Aug. 10, 2006

  Strategies

  

• Give Customers Important Roles to Play in Shaping Your Business

  Natural Behaviors You Can Tap to Unleash Customer Innovation

  by Patricia Seybold

  Our research in customer innovation revealed that there are five distinct roles that passionate customers naturally adopt with respect to an organization whose products and services they care about.
  Jul. 6, 2006

  Strategies

  

• What Business Models Work in an Open Source World?

  Cohesive Financial Technologies: How a Software Start-Up Thinks through Its Options

  by Patricia Seybold

  How does open source work as part of a business model? A start-up company explains how to think through the different dimensions of open source.
  Jun. 29, 2006

  All Members

  

• Muji

  Engaging Customers to Help with Product Design

  by Patricia Seybold

  Muji—a well-known retail brand in Japan—has integrated customer input and suggestions into its core business operations. Muji encourages customers to submit product design ideas and to comment and vote on each others' ideas.
  Jun. 15, 2006

  All Members

  

• Making Outside Innovation the “Path of Least Resistance” in Your Organization

  A Blueprint for Harnessing Customer-Led Innovation

  by Patricia Seybold

  Organizations that are doing a great job of harnessing their customers’ creativity to fuel innovation have five practices in common. You can leapfrog your competition by taking these five steps.
  May. 11, 2006

  Strategies