How do you improve the usefulness of products? Internal design teams? Focus groups? Nope. According to an article in Sunday’s New York Times, you should let citizens of Denmark try the products out and suggest improvements. In the article, Michael Fitzgerald tells that the government of Denmark has established the idea of user-driven innovation as a policy which allows their citizens to test products and make suggestions for how they could be improved upon and has also helped the small nation become more competitive in today’s global economy.
Now, we’ve been talking about user-driven innovation for some time, as our own Eric von Hippel is a huge advocate of user-centered innovation (here, here, and here). And he's the author of a book on the subject, Democratizing Innovation. Much of what he is talking about is being tested in Denmark. von Hippel has talked about the Danish company, Lego, for years as an organization famous for tapping consumer ideas for new products (here). And here's a little from the article about how citizen product design is working in Denmark:
Denmark may be the perfect testing ground for citizen product design, says Christopher Lettl, who six months ago left his native Germany to become professor of user-driven innovation at the University of Aarhus School of Business in Denmark. He thinks that Danish culture’s focus on the concept of “janteloven,” which holds that no person is better than another, may make companies more open to ideas from their users. The Danish company Lego is famous for tapping customers to help develop its Mindstorms NXT robotics kit.
Skeptics argue that Denmark is both small — population, 5.4 million — and a backwater of innovation, and thus has little to lose in trying something new. They might also point out that even in Denmark, Mr. von Hippel’s ideas are up against more conventional forms of user-aided design, such as sending anthropologists to study how people use products in their daily lives. Companies then translate their research into new designs.
Even some of Mr. von Hippel’s acolytes remain cautious. “A lot of this is still in the category of, ‘You could imagine this working out really well,’ ” says Saul T. Griffith, who as an M.I.T. engineering student was part of a group of kite-surfers who developed products for their sport that have since become commercialized. Mr. von Hippel wrote about Mr. Griffith in his 2005 book, “Democratizing Innovation.”
Still, Mr. Griffith can cite a long tradition of user design. One of his favorite examples comes from the title article in Tom Wolfe’s 1965 book, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” which chronicled car customizers whose innovations — tailfins, double headlights, low-slung bodies — were later adopted by Detroit. Mr. Griffith says that even now, millions of people modify their cars, far more people than the world’s automakers could ever employ in research and development.
There is currently no effective way for companies to harness the ideas of those millions. But the Web — itself created by Tim Berners-Lee, an Internet user looking to do something new — seems to offer an excellent potential idea-gatherer. Mr. Griffith’s industrial design firm, Squid Labs, last year spun off a do-it-yourself community site on the Web called the Instructables, which features items as diverse as the Minty Boost iPod power source, dachshund wheelchairs and guns made entirely of K’nex toys, along with detailed instructions on how to build them. The Instructables intends to offer software to companies that want to build communities of citizen product developers.
Mr. von Hippel, who has spent 30 years waiting for his ideas to take hold, says that as user communities like the Instructables spread, they will dominate innovation. He calls them “the dark matter of innovation.”
User-driven innovation may still be in its infancy, but it is clear that companies should keep an eye open to whether something is rosy in the state of Denmark.
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