Punch holes in the box (and I'm not talking FedEx....)

Always be on the lookout for disruptive technologies, both from internally and from your customers.

Customers are a significant source of creativity, and aggregating their inputs (collective intelligence) can translate to the bottom line. They are powerful because they aren't paid to love your product (or paid to hate it - another potential source of valuable information), and because they probably know it better than you. These users tend to come in 2 flavours: "creative", who use new and old versions of your products, often for uses unforeseen by the company (think of the Fedex box furniture maker);
and "lead" users who are reaching far ahead -- they push your product forward. They know your feature suite and want more.

Getting customers on board can be done by having consistent standards, freely (but controlled) sharing of information, and through (I love this) "Wabi Sabi", the beauty of imperfection which inspires the incentive to improve. But user involvement carries inherent risk. I think about Four Seasons, where we take such excrutiating care with every word, photograph and action that is expressed publicly on behalf of the brand. While we know our customers are loyal and do enjoy singing our praises, how do we control the brand messaging if we let customers have free and public reign of discussion groups, for example? It could be as innocuous as "When I stayed at Four Seasons Maui, I had the most amazing spa amenity in my room." What expectation does that set for other customers if this isn't standard practice?

As an extension of evaluating customer input, our groups had to evaluate a different scenario of customers adopting particular businesses. The tricky part is that group members, distributed throughout the room, could only communicate via Google docs. The learning from the process was far more fascinating than the business decisions:

1. Collaborative, real-time discussions must be moderated, structured, and when time is limited, divided and assigned.
2. Instant messaging for discussion should be kept separately from document creation.
3. It is challenging to control groupmates' actions and comments within the document.
4. We ran into a cross-cultural situation where the Europeans didn't appreciate a North American's irreverency with the assignment.
   

Investing tip
Companies in information assets - newspapers, radio, TV, etc. - will lose out to user groups unless they can figure out how to harness the public's energy profitably.