If you’ve been following our activities with customer-led innovation events such as V-Jam that took place with NESTA and Virgin Atlantic last year, and most recently T-Jam (see what we did there?!) with Tesco.com, you might be interested in an update. So here’s one for T-Jam:
Customer-led innovation is about giving a set of bright thinkers who have great insight into the needs of customers a forum within which to express their ideas and have them listened to. In other words, it’s a forum within which customers themselves can create, develop and communicate ideas of their own and have them directly listened to by the senior decision makers in the organisation. It’s also an exercise in open innovation – more on that another day – because these ideas can’t be kept secret, and so, there’s nothing to stop anyone in the industry taking
T-Jam is a customer-led innovation forum with a difference though, in that in the evening we are inviting developers in to write applications based on these ideas, using Nick Lansley’s API for Tesco.com. These applications will be part of the Tesco.com affiliate programme, so developers and designers who make applications have a financial incentive and reward for creating applications that customers find useful.
So, T-Jam should yield results very quickly, as once the day is done, the race will be on to get making affiliate revenue, as well as to win the overall Tesco prize for the best application.
The important thing to say right now is that although the Tesco API is open and available for anyone to use, but the affiliate programme for that API is only in an early trial. This trial is a limited one, to which only a finite number of people will be invited to sign up. This invite list will be comprised of the people who attend the T-Jam event itself; and this event is full I’m afraid.
The only reason for this is that this is an experiment, and so the early stages of it are to test the concept and the mechanics of the scheme. So doing this with a manageable number of people, to whom we can listen and respond appropriately makes a lot of sense. If successful of course, this restriction won’t last for long, so your time will come!
But please don’t attend the venue for T-Jam unless you have received a confirmation of your attendance. It’s a simple “if your name’s not on the list…” scenario I’m afraid.
I do have a small number of invites still available for the more creative amongst you, who can participate in the DAYTIME event with customers. So email me if you think you’ll add some value here. This is not a way of getting into the affiliate programme though, so no dev’s in disguise please! :)
Anyway, how’s the day shaping up?
Well, as well as the people who originated this; Tesco, EMC Consulting and NESTA, we’ve engaged Happen, who are an agency who specialise in the facilitation of large-scale customer events around the area of innovation. They’ve been working hard to recruit customers, make sure they’re incentivised and motivated to take part, and are staffing the day with a team of facilitators to ensure that sessions stay on track, but are also facilitated in such a way that ideas are able to breathe and shape.
At some point we can take a look at the budget items for this day, but at the moment, all I’ll say is that it’s not as expensive as you might think. Granted, we’ve had some good support from people like NESTA, Microsoft and a number of Tesco suppliers, all of whom see this event as a valuable insight into how shoppers shop and what motivates application developers, and that helps enormously, but even bearing that in mind, the event, the follow-up and the management of the subsequent programme of works is not as cost-prohibitive as you might imagine. More on that another day once the final numbers are in!
The daytime event, with customers will look at a small number of ‘challenge areas’. These are topics set by the leadership team of Tesco; the idea being to focus thinking enough that any resultant ideas are going to be aligned with Tesco’s business objectives, but keeping them broad enough that they do not constrain the thinking of customers. A previous event we ran had a completely open spaces format, and although successful, many of the customers who attended asked for more structure; so here, we’re trying a more structured approach, but trying to keep the spirit of open spaces within the challenge areas in order to let the innovation flow.
Around each of the challenge areas we are creating an inspire board, aiming to provide a wide variety of inputs into the thinking process. On these, we’ll print up and paste images relating to a whole bunch of shopping and lifestyle activities relating to the challenge area, as well as a variety of technologies, both present and future. The idea here isn’t to guide thinking, but it’s acknowledging that not everyone in the room knows what’s possible, and aims to give them permission to widen up their thinking in terms of the possibilities.
We will capture ideas and thinking throughout the day, using a couple of techniques. The first and most obvious of course is the good old fashioned post-it and index cards. It’s important we leave a good record of the day behind on the walls, because in the evening we have to communicate these ideas to developers. So not only is it written communication, but we also employ through the day a group of ‘visualisers’. Because as we all know there’s nothing more powerful than a sketch to bring an idea to life, so these talented illustrators will spend their time floating about the groups, and helping bring ideas to life in pictures. We found this absolutely invaluable at previous events, so we’re keen to repeat it here.
Finally, we’re also hoping to have a number of other inspiration points. This is a technology agnostic day, so we don’t want to overwhelm people with technology from anyone in particular, but equally we did want to expose the attendees to a wide variety of inputs. So we will have a Microsoft Surface device available, a well known mobile phone company is also planning to attend with a stand of its consumer devices, and so on. For those in the room who have nothing more sophisticated than a PC and a mobile that’s a few years old, this can be a real eye-opener and helps everyone get a similar baseline of thinking in terms of ‘what’s possible’.
Ok, that’s it for now. Remember, please don’t gate-crash. The whole thing will be recorded and put out on YouTube, so you can experience it for yourself, and anyone coming without a confirmed invite (and ID!) will be turned away. Even Microsoft buildings have a capacity! :)