Exploring open innovation and marketing with Tatiana Schofield
Tatiana Schofield is a Chartered Marketer and Business Development Manager for Imperial Consultants. Tatiana sits on The Board of our Greater London Region. This month, she shares with us her findings on open innovation and marketing, with informative real-life case study examples.
Tatiana says:
Over the last decade, innovation has continued shaping into more open models based on a so called co-creation input from a wider community and customers. This trend has a significant implication for marketers as it transforms the entire marketing mix into a novel approach.
New types of innovations assume a more collaborative and creative approach connecting different parts of organisations, communities, industries and end users.
Moreover, emerging markets are catching up and leapfrogging stages of economic development by exploiting national creativity. For example frugal innovation (or often called Jugaad or Ghandian) enables new product development using a low cost technology and Indian creativity.
An emerging range of open business models (e.g. Google, eBay, Facebook etc) and a fast growing community involvement are changing traditional marketing approaches. Leading business are already using a power of co-creation to produce new ideas, new services and test new products. One of current marketing challenges is to build strong communities, keep them engaged and creatively exploit their co-innovation power. This is challenging but there are many good examples marketers can follow.
Starbucks started using My Starbucks Idea asking customers to share their ideas and suggestions. Initially started as an idea hub for customers the website is now a community platform with over 180,000 customers manifesting Starbuck’s social media strategy in action.
Virgin Atlantic has recently launched a Beta service, VJAM, which allows its customers to co-innovate and make their travel more social.
A pharmaceutical giant, GlaxoSmithKline, is using an open innovation model want-find-get-manage to search for promising technologies to improve their rate of innovation and satisfy demanding customers.
Innocentive offers a cloud-based platform for millions of problem solvers connecting them with businesses and organisations to speed up their rate of innovation, reduce risks and costs.
More information about open innovation
Take a look at Tatiana’s LinkedIn profile.
CIM are running training courses on Innovation over the coming months, take a look.