Last summer I got involved in a big discussion at the Corante Innovative Marketing Conference about exactly where the responsibility should lie at companies for involving customers in innovation. Our consensus was in the marketing department. We are not the only ones – a new Forrester report on Customer-Driven Innovation concurs: “CMOs need to use their expertise in connecting with customers to lead the way in building bridges between customers and key parts of the organization.”

Customer-Driven Design and Development was prepared exclusively for the CMO Group at Forrester Research, so if you want the whole report, you’ll have to join the CMO group to buy it – however, you can get a free summary brief at this link.

The report includes six case studies of customer-driven design and development initiatives at various companies, as well as:

--Best practices
--Information on common objections CMOs may run into at their companies and how to overcome these
--Specific advice from 25 experts in this space, including both Gwen Ishmael and myself from Decision Analyst, who were interviewed as sources for the report.
--Information on a variety of tactics such as ethnography. online communities and consumer brainstorming (which is, of course, one of the things we do)
--An overview of 18 different vendors (including us!) who can help CMOs with customer-driven innovation initiatives

I have to offer kudoes to author Cindy Commander on this report. She's presented a wealth of information and some thoughtful analysis, including a Customer-Driven Design Maturity Model. Essentially, this is an illustration of how organization progress in their engagement with customers in the co-creation process, from minimal customer engagement through continuous customer engagement. The four stages start at a company-centric orientation and moving toward a customer-centric orientation:

--Stage 1: Customer-tested design and development
--Stage 2: Customer-involved design and development
--Stage 3: Customer-focused design and development
--Stage 4: Customer-driven design and development

If you looked at your company with just this one analytic in mind, what would you find? How far is your company from Stage 4? How close would your company like to be to Stage 4?

If you're serious about customer co-creation, this report would be a worthwhile read. Of course, I've already disclosed that we were sources, but even if we weren't, I would at least take a peek at the free brief!