Welcome to the Listening Post!

This morning Kathy Harris, Gartner VP & Distinguished Analyst, presented “Innovation: Your New Core Competency” at the North American Gartner CRM conference. Kathy began by asserting “CRM is the most fruitful innovation opportunity for your company and your customers.”

 

Kathy identified six key drivers shaping innovation in the coming five years:

1. Seek out innovation through consumerization and the Web. This is a fertile area as past business models are disrupted. Learn from companies far outside your market space.
2. Embrace customers as co-creators in innovation. The future of idea generation includes crowdsourcing, idea marketplaces and innovation “jams”. Many customers want you to serve them better in the future: you need to identify these lead customers from the standpoint of idea generation, build communities and councils to “systematize VOC” and spark customer creativity.  "If you don't engage your customers in innovation, someone else will," Kathy said.
3. Similarly, embrace your business partners in innovation. Build outside-in networks as eBay has done with 85,000 developers; co-develop, as Novartis has done on public-sponsored research; and build inside-out networks as P&G has done.
4. Let social trends pull you into further innovation. Changes in demographics, lifestyles, technology use and refusal all provide opportunities for reconsidering the types of products and services you provide today.
5. Innovate with your IT spending. In a Gartner survey of over 2000 organizations last year, 67% of IT budgets were spent on running the business, 19% on growing the business and only 14% on transforming the business. You need to set goals to innovate your IT infrastructure to reduce costs, to free up additional budget for growth and transformation.
6. Don’t forget basic CRM best practices. You can’t build innovative CRM capabilities on a shaky foundation.

Kathy Harris' final recommendation: "Continually innovate how you innovate!"