outside innovation

Before starting, the team members were invited to read a number of books and articles:

Last on the list was Patty Seybold’s Outside Innovation. I can’t do better than quote the introduction to her blog:

What is Outside Innovation? It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services.

So she is addressing one part of the solution to the innovator’s dilemma. And she makes an interesting point in the book, but more clearly in a recent blog, about predicting the future using crowdsourcing. Her blog points us to the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing’s eLabeXchange prediction market. Red Stripe was not trying to predict the future using crowdsourcing but trying to get ideas about what it should do. One of the ideas it received related to setting up a prediction market (which it had already considered at length in the early days). So, by extension, something that Red Stripe could have done would have been to set up a prediction market for itself – getting people to bet on what would be the ‘innovative and web-based product, service or business model’ that it would come up with. Though it sounds improbable, the wisdom of crowds would perhaps have prevailed.

Dilemmas:

Can you use a prediction market to avoid making any decisions at all yourself?