Dear Executive:

            Passionate customers are the primary source of product and service innovations for many companies.  Unfortunately, few companies invest in a specific effort to engage passionate customers in innovation.

            Our company, Orange Passion, will share a series of book summaries and case studies about how your passionate customers could create great ideas and collaborate together. 

            Your passionate customers, once you connect with them, can help with the following:

·                     Provide ideas for to product, service, and marketing improvements

·                    Create home-run innovations which may transform your business

·                    Increase positive press by leveraging customer-created content

As noted in recent articles and books, more companies are investing in experiments involving passionate customer innovation.  Orange Passion can help you with fast and easy experiments to test the waters for your own company.

As Time stated on the cover of the March 20, 2006 issue:  “How the Internet Makes Us All Inventors” and “Creative ideas used to come from a few geniuses, but technology is leveling the playing field so that we’re all part of the process.”

Democratizing Innovation by Eric von Hippel of MIT discusses how ‘lead users,’ or what Orange Passion calls ‘passionate customers,’ are the major source of product and service innovations.  The trend is towards more innovation by lead users and new abilities for collaboration among passionate customers.  Innovation and collaboration among passionate customers can be facilitated by your company.  That is the premise and services of Orange Passion.  Attached is a summary of Democratizing Innovation.  Email me if you would like a longer summary of 5 pages.

            If these ideas interest you, contact me to discuss how Orange Passion could be explored within your company, customers, and product lines.  Our Pilot Project is a small project of $9,500 with an unconditional guarantee.  It takes only 1-2 days of your staff time and less than one month of calendar time from start to finish.  Contact me at 240-396-1376 or email to discuss your ideas and interests in passionate customers and Orange Passion.

Democratizing Innovation

By Eric von Hippel - 2005.

Summary:

This is a book by a professor from MIT on innovation by people.  Professor von Hippel discusses innovation by ‘users’ and the diffusion of those innovations.  To summarize:

  • Users are the first to develop many new industrial and consumer products. 
  • Users are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. 
  • Users will be an increasingly important source of innovation. 
  • Manufacturers should systematically search for lead user generated innovation.
  • The focus on target markets means that lead users are often regarded as outliers of no interest. 
  • User innovation is likely to be a widely distributed phenomenon and it would be difficult to predict in advance which users have most likely developed very valuable innovations. 
  • Users who freely reveal what they have done often find that others then improve or suggest improvements to the innovation to mutual benefit. 
  • One challenge for management is to capture the knowledge being generated by users online during the process of doing and producing. 
  • Products developed by users become more valuable if they are somehow diffused so that others can benefit from them. 
  • The innovating user may benefit from the inquiries and diffusions via number of network effects. 
  • Freely revealing users also may benefit from enhancement of reputation, from positive network effects due to increased diffusion of their innovation, and from other factors.
  • Individuals are often strongly motivated to innovate by the joy and learning they find in this work. 

Courtesy of Orange Passion – www.orangepassion.com – 240-396-1376

Orange Passion helps to find your passionate customers to create innovative ideas to improve products, service, and marketing with brainstorming and collaboration.