Co-innovation is a hot topic in social CRM circles these days and rightly so, one of the characteristics of the social customer is this drive to participate as a part of brand engagement. In other words if you care about a brand, something that is clearly desirable from a companies perspective, you want to help the brand create products that, in your opinion, be more successful or meet your needs more closely. That's co-innovation in the consumer or B to C market and spawned ideasourcing applications that help brands engage with and collect ideas from its customers. The pic at the left is one example from Starbucks and was created using salesforce.com Ideas platform on MyStarbucksIdeas.com. There are quite a few more examples available and several software vendors that have products in the ideasourcing market including BrightIdea, Spigit and Uservoice.
That's in the B to C space but what about B to B, couldn't co-innovation, or the process of synergistic development of innovative ideas and products in cooperative environments or ecosystems prove to be a business advantage to businesses that choose to participate? To be fair there have been many initiatives by companies that try to foster co-innovative environments, but in software this has primarily been on the partner side of the business, not vendor facilitating customers' co-innovation. SAP, for example, has a history around co-innovation, launching Co-Innovation Labs in 2007, but while customers have certainly been involved in these labs, most of the activity has been partner (system integrator, ISV, etc.) driven. Enabling business network transformation has been a SAP message for a few years now, and other vendors have also had initiatives to get partners to work together to provide complete solutions; Microsoft, IBM and Oracle all have programs designed to foster peer to peer networking and cooperation.
Today I had the opportunity to talk to a group in SAP that has been chartered with building a program around SAP's top customers to create a productive and active customer network. The program, called The SAP Premier Customer Network (PCN), is built to provide 5 unique benefits: 1. Co-innovation, 2. Value Management, 3. Collaboration, 4. Thought Leadership and 5. Governance and Roadmapping. This network is not focused on IT improvement but on the broader concept of facilitating customer interaction in a "safe" environment to connect, learn, share and in general expand and grow your peer and professional networks. With SAP's broad customer base I think the co-innovation strategy as a part of a formal network program has some real promise. Here's a slide that the group is using to explain the concept:
The PCN has a long list of benefits:
- Resource Gateway - a portal for accessing the PCN and interacting on the network that will include blogs, vlogs, webinars and other social business tools
- Ambassador Program - A dedicated team from SAP that represents in PCN inside SAP
- Planning and Roadmaps - Formal opportunity to influence SAP's product and solution direction along with other network members
- The Cone of Silence - (this is one of my favorite ideas in the program) A "firewalled" ability to share and validate business initiatives and best practices with selected peers in collaborative and co-innovative environment
- Invention and Innovation - Cross-enterprise, network sourced innovation
The PCN is fairly new and is available in North America but is a global program with other regions working on programs as well. Here's a slide that shows the PCN in context to the SAP ecosystem:
Co-innovation is becoming a business imperative in the emerging social business era. This is a thought leading proposition from SAP and I believe that you will see more efforts from software vendors to create co-innovation ecosystems due to their unique position to facilitate trusted networks because of their reach and strategic importance to their customers.
