Innovation Engine Blog

A healthy innovation pipeline requires an understanding of the customer. By organizing customer information and making it easily available to decision makers in the company, you open up the gates of innovation. There are many tools available today to organize and extend the value of a customer database. “Can you describe your customers for me?” Ask that question of a company with a healthy innovation pipeline and the answer will be timely, thoughtful and reflective of distinct profitable segments.

At companies struggling to maintain relevancy in the marketplace, however, customer information is often old, anecdotal, or biased; maintaining a momentum that can destroy a critical connection in the company’s innovation pipeline.

This difference has become more apparent as companies fail in this credit starved economy.

The problem is not always that companies are not finding out about customers, it often is that they have not made the effort to organize the data. Enter customer management technology. You can call it Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Management Software, or Sales Automation (SA), but it all amounts to storing information in a way that facilitates a consistent, timely and descriptive understanding of your existing customer base.

A former client in the beer industry used Salesforce.com Dashboards to provide real-time information to brand managers about their customers (and non-customers). Even though they didn’t transact directly with end customers, they aggregated surveys, customer inquiries, and third-party studies coming from different functional areas of the organization at an individual level (when possible). In this case, decisions about sports sponsorship, promotion and marketing programs reflected the customers’ changing tastes and interests. They didn’t have to wait for a meeting to discuss the information to be gathered — it was on their desktop.

Using technology to track customer information is no longer just for the big guys. There is an offering to fit every business size. From products like Salesforce.com that can be purchased and up and running in a month, to customer data mining applications that take enterprise level integration efforts.

Additionally there is a robust marketplace of applications that work with these systems. Salesforce.com’s AppExchange has add-ons that put powerful survey, email campaign, analysis, and visualization tools in reach of your employees. Riskonnect ERM is one of the most innovative risk management tools that I have seen. It provides a visualization framework that can be customized with information such as customer satisfaction or life-stage distribution.

The potential uses of organized customer information can feed marketing, product development and even M&A activity. The claim of a merger based on complimentary customer bases would be far more convincing with the means to quantify it.

Innovation happens because employees care about meeting customer needs. Thus, meeting customers should be a core competency of every business.

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If you’re still looking for a costume idea and you’re 36, you’re in luck. Show up tweeting from your mobile device and instantly be: the driving force behind Twitter's success. Although recent studies have shown that younger folks are warming up to Twitter, it’s the age 35 to 44 year old demographic in 2008 that catapulted the micro-blogging service into mainstream consciousness.

You can’t watch TV, read your RSS feed or even have a conversation without tweet-infiltration. It’s everywhere. DM’s, @’s, RT’s, hashtags and now listing. The subculture that comes along with being one of many “tweoples” has even penetrated advertising and packaging. This Twitter explosion and Twittification of language really got me thinking: why the 35 to 44 demographic? I’m sure I’m not alone in this question. So here’s an idea:

#CommandLineInterface

The age 35 to 44 demographic might remember a little thing called DOS. Yes, the Disk Operating System. DOS operated on a Command Line Interface, on which you’d enter a command, combined with characters like these: $, %, #, :, > and @ . A few of these same characters form the framework of the “Twitterverse.” Yes, the hashtag. Not to mention the “@.” Some CLI users, depending on the operating system, could type in the “@” character to specify users. Sound familiar? It’s pretty simple to see the connection: The age 35 to 44 demographic might have a leg up navigating Twitter due to previous CLI usage. If this same demographic began using CLI in their first computer interactions, it’s not so crazy to think that adopting Twitter seemed more natural—more intuitive.

Some might deem this hypothesis misleading because of Twitter's simplicity and ease of use, regardless of CLI experience, but place yourself in an outsider's shoes. Navigating Twitter would be confusing with the many functional symbols and site-specific verbiage. Getting oriented takes time. Having CLI experience may have made it a little easier for a specific demographic to become acclimated.

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Healthcare. Now that’s a loaded term these days. What can we do to create a solution? First of all, we might start with the people involved.

Buying healthcare services is like no other purchase process.

When people make big purchases, they’ve usually done their research and know exactly what they’re paying for. For instance, automobile information is everywhere. And that’s why no one walks up to their local dealership and says “I’ll take that one and decide later if it’s really what I need and if I can afford it.” Information allows people to avoid big financial and personal burdens. But in the healthcare industry, information that helps to make a balanced decision that directly impacts quality of life can be hard to come by. The traditional healthcare information infrastructure does not invite the patient to be involved in understanding exactly what a medical course of action could entail and how much it could cost. The doctor’s role is to do what’s best for the health of the patient, versus administer the financial aspects of the treatment and services. So, healthcare professionals focus on keeping patients healthy, but patients end up receiving the financial information months after the treatment.

People confuse health insurance with healthcare.

Because provider services including hospitals, exams and pharmaceuticals are out of reach monetarily for most Americans, insurance companies are seen as the gatekeepers of healthcare. Instead of looking first to our individual healthcare needs and then purchasing a policy accordingly, many Americans first select a plan which becomes a proxy for healthcare choices, further complicating how an individual is entangled in finding a healthcare solution.

Because healthcare and health insurance are so intertwined, finding a solution for one part of the problem just doesn’t work. We might as well be plugging a small crack in the dam while water seeps through other, equally vulnerable points.

To be a part of something better, we have to think differently about healthcare, health insurance, and how they’re related. To build a solution we need to:

1.) Help create ways for people to manage healthcare using health insurance as one of many significant tools. This would mean that people could shop smarter for health insurance and get access to the healthcare they need, while managing the financial impact of it in real-time.

2.) Re-think the ultimate external factor: our lifestyles. For many Americans, a sedentary lifestyle fueled by poor food choices has become the norm, causing a myriad of health problems. By breaking out of this cycle, Americans could lessen lifestyle-associated diseases and conditions, as well as the high costs that come with them.

3.) Change the existing information flows about healthcare choices to improve patient outcomes both physically and financially. There is no single solution that will change the factors building momentum toward a healthcare meltdown. Instead, we need many ideas from which evolutionary and revolutionary solutions will be developed.