But too many examples only makes the article even longer. I can however present them here...
The changes that I'm referring to here are serious, broad, and long-term and do indeed apply to just about every kind of business (though a very few highly regulated businesses will be a little less affected.) This absolutely does include businesses that build physical products and not just media or software companies. In fact, many of the best examples of next-generation business are in tangible goods companies as we'll see.
The central point I was making here is that each and every company in the world will have to adopt the strategies and business models I've captured here for a very simple reason: The efficiencies and value created, compared to the traditional methods, will just put them as a significant competitive disadvantage.
So let's get more specific with examples since I do understand that it can be difficult to take these often foreign-seeming high-level concepts and general trends and mapping them to business specifics. Below are some real-world examples of the next-generation business models I'm talking about for various operational business functions. Please keep in mind I can't list them all here and this is just the tip of the iceberg. These are part of a broad change in the business landscape that I'm seeing.
Product Development: Opening up the design of a product to the marketplace (often through crowdsourcing) cuts costs and taps into vast pools of 3rd party innovation. The market will practically designing the products they want from you for you if you'll only let them. Note: Good curation and the ability to elicit participation is an essential skill, so you'll often use a partner that can do this well. Examples: LG had one of their phones designed recently this way on Crowdspring for a fraction of the cost of the traditional design process. Top iPod case maker Mophie created one of their most popular products in the same manner, with a service called Kluster. There are dozens of other major examples, including the Netflix Prize I mentioned or Goldcorp. Most or all of these examples were linked to in the article above.
Customer Service: Social CRM services like those from GetSatisfaction and Helpstream are letting hundreds of companies, some of them large global brands, make it possible to spread customer support work to other interested customers, who often know the products and services better. I covered last summer how customers are doing this themselves if the companies won't let them (Harley Davidson, IKEA, XM Radio) with online communities. Bottom line, the data shows that support costs drop and customer service levels increase when the next-generation business models presented here are used for customer service and CRM.
Marketing: Many companies, particularly ones who make tangible products, are using their customers as the best source of marketing ideas and even the content itself. Doritos in particular has been very successful recently at crowdsourcing marketing (the famous Doritos Crash SuperBowl campaign), and their U.K. division has done a version of this that they've recorded very detailed metrics on , showing that if you let your passionate customers tell your story, you can achieve significant bottom-line results. They achieved double digit growth in an otherwise moribund industry. GM has done this in a major way and many other major companies such as Converse and Mervis Diamonds as well.
I have numerous other examples in other lines of business and will respond more fully to this in an upcoming post. The intent here was to sum up all the examples of next-generation business like this taking place today into a broad set of trends that we can then apply systemically to move our business thinking forward. I certainly did not write this post lightly or to be overly theoretical, but to extract the common patterns and principles out.
Simply put, this was based on the truly amazing things I'm seeing take place all over the business world today despite it being very early days yet for the full strength vision. So I'd please ask that you re-read carefully, what I'm presenting here is what I believe to be a pretty accurate model for what is actually happening in the world today and where it's going in the long term, for businesses large and small.
Again, the challenge will be being able to map it to your industry effectively before your competition does. This is the hard part for most of us.
Thanks for taking the time to comment and share your thoughts.
Best,
Dion Hinchcliffe
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