Category / EN : Academics

by YannigRoth

Who participates in co-creation, and what do participants expect ?

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One of the most brilliant answers I’ve read is given by Johann Füller, CEO of Hyve, in his research paper Refining Virtual Co-Creation from a Consumer Perspective. He highlights that a lot has been written about the empowerment of the consumer, the capabilities provided by the web or the benefits of collabporative innovation, but “our understanding about who participates and what those participants expect from their engagement in virtual co-creation projects is limited“. In his paper, he explores how heterogeneous participants are and how co-creation focused companies should handle these different personnalities. Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

Design Thinking for social innovation, the “third way” to empower the Third World

The issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review was on a corner of my desk for a while, but I finally managed to find the time to read this article which makes the cover-story of Stanford’s journal : Design Thinking for Social Innovation, by Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt. Both are executives at IDEO, a global Design design firm which has worked with notorious companies like Kaiser Permanente or Shimano (see this previous blog post). In this article, the authors highlight the social scope of Design Thinking, explaining in what way it can help very poor people to improve their lives.

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Design For The Other 90%, an exhibition gathering numerous social design projects in New York's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (retrieved from other90.cooperhewitt.org)

There’s maybe no other domain in which human-centered design is as important as in social issues. As the article says, “social challenges require systemic solutions“, because these problems are wicked, and demand to adress peoples’ real needs, in the most effective possible way. Look at d.light, created by two students of Stanford’s Institute of Design : what started as a way to provide affordable and safe light for people without access to electricity has now become a global company with an efficient distribution, sales & marketing strategy. And they want to “have improved the quality of life of 100 million people” by 2020.

“Design thinkers […] consider what we call the adges, the places where “extreme” people live differently”

But in what is Design Thinking responsible for improving poor peoples’ lives ? The innovation approach has already been embraced by successful companies like Procter & Gamble or RIM (Blackberry), as one of the theory’s fathers Roger L. Martin describes in his book The Design of Business. Nonprofit organizations are discovering Design Thinking as a way to find “high-impact solutions [that] bubble up from below rather than being imposed from the top“. An interesting example is provided by the authors when they depict Jerry and Monique Sternin‘s approach to decrease malnutrition in Vietnam in the 90’s. They found so-called “positive deviants“, people whose behaviors revealed a viable solution to overcome nutritional flaws : they added tiny shrimps, crabs and snails from rice paddies to the food, and they fed the children multiple smaller meals. By offering cooking courses to families, 80% of the 1,000 enrolled children became adequately nourished. Design Thinking is about finding creative ideas, including those of deviants who may have viable solutions to problems too.

The approach relies on thinkers being “T-shaped“, an expression introduced by Berkeley-professor Morten T. Hansen (the article was already published in Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge in 2001). This means that beside having a deep knowledge of a specific field, the design thinkers has a broad understanding of other disciplines, as well as being open, curious, optimistic and practice-oriented. This last point is important because the implementation-part of the problem-solving system requires prototyping and trial-and-error experimentation to get to a solution. When VisionSpring asked IDEO designers to help them to design a low-cost eye-screening process for children in India, it took them long to discover that the children were intimidated by the pressure of the experience. The system was designed accordingly and VisionSpring since conducts numerous screenings with children and adults. “VisionSpring’s design efforts included everything other than the design of the glasses”, say Brown & Wyatt, thus focusing on marketing and implimenting their program.

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The automotive industry has adopted a Design Thinking approach since decades, spending tromendous amounts of money in prototyping and testing. Here's the interior clay-modelling process of Audi's Le Mans Quattro presented in 2003 (retrieved March 2nd from http://www.carbodydesign.com)

This culture of testing with prototypes aims to find the best possible solution by finding unforeseen problems and anticipating unintended consequences in order to achieve a viable product. In has book The Designful Company, Marty Neumeier encourages companies to think wrong, because “hundreds of ideas ranging from the absurd to the obvious” finally make up a team’s strength and creativity. Sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2008, IDEO designers developped a methodology by which organizations can apply Design Thinking themselves. You can download the Human-Centered Design Toolkit free under http://www.ideo.com/work/item/human-centered-design-toolkit/

By the way, the term “third way” used in this post’s title is used in the article to describe the alternative that Design Thinking represents to:

  1. Feeling & intuition and
  2. Rationality & analytical thinking.

Check out the Wikipedia article if you want to find out more… or read Tim Brown’s Change by Design.

by YannigRoth

Researchers develop a tool to track brand reputation on the web

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The article is taken from the Journal of Retailing 85 (2, 2009, pages 145 to 158). The initial problem is pointed by the authors (Praveen Aggarwal and Rajiv Vaidyanathan from the University of Minnesota and Alladi Venkatesh from the University of California) is that with the wast amount of information available on the internet, there is no scientific method to analyse a brand’s reputation, based on what people (bloggers, reveiwers, retailers etc.) say about it. In this article called “Using Lexical Semantic Analysis to Derive Online Brand Positions : An Application to Retail Marketing Research”, the three researchers propose a “simple-to-use method that managers can utilize to assess their brand’s positionning“. More after the break.

Praveen Aggarval is PhD at the Marketing Department of the University of Minnestota (Labovitz School of Business & Economics, named after Joel Labovitz, businessman and patron from Duluth, MN), and Rajiv Vaidyanathan is Marketing Professor in the very same business school. Together with Alladi Venkatesh, Professor of Management and IT-expert from the University of California in Irvine, they stated the following problem : how can a product manager monitor, in a scientific way and based on the web content, the positioning of a brand?

Positioning a brand is, in marketing, the process of creating an identity and an image to a particular product or brand in order to differenciate it from its competitors. As we said in a previous article about the evolution of the brand-customer relationship, the web plays an increasing role in todays marketing, but this implies certain risks, which can be contra-productive. Without saying that product managers are losing control of their brands and products, they certainly have to deal with the multiplication of information sources about their products : blogs, customer reviews, retailer comments, comparative websites, tests etc. The retail industry is particularly competitive, that’s why branding is absolutely essential for managers (national brands as well as private brands).

In order to overcome these difficulties, the three specialists based their method on the semantic web (Berners-Lee, Hendler & Lassila 2001 ; Leuf 2006). Even if computers can’t understand text information, an analysis of the co-occurence of an adjective and a noun (brand, product) clearly give an insight of the web-users’ perception. To that extent, “the goal is to get a sense of the evaluation of brands in subjective sentences (…) by examining the association between the brand and various carefully selected adjectives or descriptors“. The aim therefore is to draw conclusions about the “brand’s online persona” based on a brand name + a certain adjective + a context.

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To get the results, the three researchers basically used a beta version of Google’s API (Application Program Interface), which can be seen as the open-source part Google’s research program. The results returned (I leave the technical details aside, but the principle is to count pages that contain the brand name, and then those that contain the brand-adjective association) allow the draw a perceptual map, where differents brands can be compared. The analysis of P&G detergents reveal, for example, that Dreft and Ivory Snow (often associated with “baby”, rarely with “power”) seem to be perceived differently than Bold andEra (opposite results). The exception is the brand Cheer, to which both word are often associated. For Cheer and Era, we can note that the can design is identical, only te colour and the marketing “message” changes (typography, slogan etc.), which is apparently sufficient to differentiate the product images.

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Further analysis is possible, for example on perfumes. The marketing researchers chose this particular product because of the importance of image and brand personality, “carefully crafted by marketers to position brands in a competitive marketplace“. Here, they point out the marketing efforts of brand managers. The method is particularly usefull for these marketers because of the “longitudinal analysis of a brand’s personality” that such monitoring permits. The conclusion states that their method does not account for negative qualifiers, what is quite suprising. I indeed wonder how such a study can be conducted if the tool does not differentiate “reliable”, “somewhat reliable” and “not reliable” ! But the authors ensure that “previous research has shown that the effects (of the polarity of the statements) are marginal (Pang et al. 2002)“. Very surprising…

Anyway, the method that the researchers developped enables marketing executives to track the positionning of their brands, particularly taking into consideration the dynamic nature of the web. In a moving environment, longitudinal tracking seems to become more and more important, and consumer understanding can be improved. Coped with consumer interaction, these means are strategic tools for web-based marketing.