Using your customer base as your research and development

[daBigBee]

Thinking about Netflix’s recent decision to go the public in search of an answer to problem with it’s service, I began to wonder if this isn’t the best way to deal with problem with services and products as a whole? The true is that as a small business, most of us don’t have a research and development ( R & D ) department, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we can initiate some ad-hoc R & D with our most trusted and loyal customers. Now granted Netflix had $1 million dollars to throw at the person who makes the most meaningful contribution or outright solves their problem and that’s a great motivator. I can imagine the person who has always known what would solve this problem but never had any incentive to present the solution, so it’s been gathering dust in the back of their minds – but not anymore! They’ve got $1 million reason to at the very least just give it a shot and see what happens. So the question is now, how can small businesses such as ourselves use this trend of Open Source R & D? Obviously most of us don’t have a million bucks to throw at the person who gives us the best idea on how to improve our products and services but a paid vacation to Hawaii isn’t a bad prize either.

[Dcrux]

So the question is now, how can small businesses such as ourselves use this trend of Open Source R & D?

It is an interesting question. Since a lot of it is done simply to save money, it goes wrong in a big way.

First off, you may have two, three or more customer segments. Each of these groups is buying and using for different reasons. Simply taking down feature requests from a mass of customers without segmentation, creates what's called a "dog's breakfast," a chimera product of mismatched features.

Because the company is using outsourcing to substitute for research and development, they never gain the listening or interpretation skills.

Finally the group most likely to take a hand: early adopters. The group most likely to fill the coffers: early majority. Having one segment design the product for the other segment is likely to introduce two problems where there was one.

It's not a bad idea. However, the very mindset which usually produces the idea makes it deeply flawed in execution.