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16 Nov 08

Faster horses in the age of co-creation, by JP Rangaswami (Confused of Calcutta blog)

Thought-provoking blog entry in Confused of Calcutta (JP Rangaswami) about innovation, focusing on the role of the user in co-creation (customer choice and voice, eg.).

confusedofcalcutta.com/...rses-in-the-age-of-co-creation - Preview

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I was part of the Do Not Dumb Down group, by the way. But that was nearly thirty years ago, I had just trained to become a callow economist, and my head was full of strange ideas. Ideas like merit goods. Ideas that allowed us to get to a point where, in many nations, Nanny State Knows Best. Where it was apparently considered normal to visualise a class of people who knew better than other classes of people.

Now, as I look back on those times and those discussions, I wonder at myself. Was I that arrogant? What residue of that arrogance do I carry now?

Why am I sharing all this? To make the point that for many years, even for centuries, it was considered normal for customers to have neither voice nor choice. That it was considered normal for one group of people to decide what other groups of people could have, should have, would have.
We’ve had choice for many years now, but it’s been vendor-dominated choice. Modern, more sophisticated, more elaborate versions of Any Colour You Want As Long As It’s Black. Nowadays it’s more akin to Any Colour You Want As Long As It’s Mine. People consider it normal to ask questions like “So what’s your lock-in?”. How do you enslave the customer? Will you come in to my parlour, said the Spider.
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- When it comes to voice, Nader and his crew did their bit, but it took the Cluetrain gang, Chris Locke et al, to get me going. Making me realise the problems caused by building walls between firms and their customers, the stupidity of Fortress Enterprise. That was then followed up by people like Esther Dyson explaining how the User is in Control, Kathy Sierra entrancing me with Creating Passionate Users, and Hugh Macleod working on the Social Object and discovering the evolution of Blue Monsters, David Weinberger explaining how folksonomies empowered customers, Doc Searls starting up the VRM movement.
- In the past, it was culturally not just defensible but acceptable to deny customers both choice as well as voice. Capital and land tended to be the scarce factors of production. But that was a very long time ago. In the past, it was culturally not just defensible but acceptable to deny customers control. Education tended to be scarce, and social status was allowed to be a basis for the bestowal of control. Mummy knows best. In the past, it was culturally not just defensible but acceptable to believe that the customer didn’t know what she wanted, that when she did know she was wrong, that the customer needed to be educated about what she really wanted, which fortuitously happened to be what you had.
  
  All that was in the past.
  
  Today, the abundances and scarcities that characterise our era are different. The scarcest, most precious resource around is the customer. That customer knows what she wants. If she doesn’t know it, she knows how to find out what it is she wants. She knows it when she sees it.
  
  That customer knows that part of what she wants is to be able to figure out what she wants. She is both consumer and producer, a partner in the process of co-creating value. The senior partner in the process of co-creating value.
- We need to be in the business of providing the customer what she wants when she wants it, where she wants it, how she wants it. We need to focus on making things that the customer wants to buy, rather than trying to get customers to pay for things they neither want nor need.
  
  There was a time when we could decide for the customer. There was a time when we could constrain the customer’s voice and choice. There was a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth.
- Stuart French said:
  
  “The next hyper-step in this age of consumer intelligence IMHO, is how much longer we are going to require political representatives to make the big decisions for us. But maybe now I’m thinking a little too far out of the box :-)”
  
  I don’t think so- I think it’s a social revolution, not just about consumers/ marketing- whatever you think of Obama’s policies, he won many supporters who voted Republican before, by (at the very least) making them feel like he was listening to their horse preferences. McCain didn’t do anything similar at all. The effect of this “marketing” difference is being widely underestimated by the media, where most things are framed in a primarily political context.
- The question I keep asking myself is “Why do people think that inventors, geniuses and creators of disruption are all *not* to be found in the class of humans called “customers”? What causes this separation? What happens if the tools used by geniuses and inventors and creators of disruption are made available to customers? Won’t we get *more* as a result? or is there a reason to have a holy of holies, a place where customers aren’t allowed to go but inventors can?

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Faster horses in the age of co-creation, by JP Rangaswami (Confused of Calcutta blog)

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