Outside innovation

Via the Business Innovation Insider Blog we found in the Outside Innovation Blog a post on Eric von Hippel. Eric von Hippel is the one of the leading scientists in the area of innovation at the MIT. Patty Seybold, the author of the Outside Innovation blog, attended a meeting of von Hippel's "Innovation Lab". She brought some of von Hippel's interesting insides on outside innovation to the readers’ attention:

• Foment organizational transformation from the outside in--invite lead users to create derivative works out of your intellectual property, to share their creative ideas with one another, and to build their own “solutions” (gadgets, mash ups, applications, etc.) leveraging your company’s branded IP.
• Host co-design sessions with lead users. Invite creative professionals from multiple disciplines to creative workshops to co-design new concepts.  Select the best of these concepts to carry further, sponsor, and commercialize.
• Encourage customers to contribute ideas and content, to pose and solve problems, and to interact with one another in public online community spaces.
• Encourage your own employees to leverage customer-contributed content, ideas, and deliverables.
• Provide tools--like high-level programming languages and toolkits to promote lead user innovation--and offer training on those tools; make sure that each training class produces real deliverables or at least prototypes of new designs.
• Get all your stakeholders aligned around customers’ desired outcomes. Provide integrated, cross-disciplinary services and support to help customers reach their outcomes; enable customer-led, individually-optimized service delivery.
• Create expert networks and link customers to networks of experts. Make it easy for people to find the experts they need.
• Empower local community-based problem solving. Provide support and structure to enable community members to collaborate to solve common problems.
• Provide tools to end users/customers to manage their own complex situations (health, projects, etc.) rather than trying to do things for them.
• Provide electronic design tools to interested end users/customers to design their own products and to design your company’s products in open design communities. Encourage customer designers to critique and vote on each others’ work.
• Harvest user-generated ideas from across the Internet. Pull it all together and look at the patterns of needs and solutions.

These aspects are useful for entrepreneurial company to develop their business, once they are establish in their original business model. Some of the aspects are also useful hints for the design process of business models.