Prediction markets are complex, but may be easier to understand than the behaviors of people. Getting people to participate in any community requires an understanding of their motivations and incentives. Getting a community of people excited about harnessing their collective wisdom to predict outcomes may require a cultural shift.
Product development includes all tasks and steps to bring a new product or service to consumers, from ideation to design, development, and marketing. For most product development teams today, it is a given that they have to test concepts and prototypes with customers early and often to validate their assumptions and direction. In some cases, this community of customers becomes so involved in the product development process that they themselves are a part of product development. Not only can they validate ideas, they can help design and build the product. Feeling ownership and a connection with the product or service, they start to market it themselves.
Yesterday I attended the first annual Healthcare Experience Design conference in Boston. It was the first time in my design career that I was with a large group of people focused on a single vertical. I know a lot of designers that specialize in an industry or sector, but this was a unique event.
Professional networking services (PNS) and social networking services (SNS) have proliferated over the past decade. The bigger the network, the greater its market value as advertisers and partners can reach larger audiences. In theory, this also means higher value and switching costs for users. Who wants to join a network with no one on it? But the behaviors of users are hard to predict. Size may actually decrease the value of a certain networks.
When Wikipedia came onto the scene a decade ago, it was fascinating to watch it evolve as a social experiment but it was not perceived as an official source of information. You did not cite Wikipedia in research (or at least didn’t admit you referenced it) as it was not considered to be credible or professional. In recent years citing Wikipedia has become acceptable. So how is it that good (and usually accurate) content emerges on Wikipedia?
The world has gone completely consumer-centric. Consumers are taking over! We’re at the center of everything! Our egos are going to get huge.
Hyperbole aside, the web has given consumers a voice at the big shiny table in the corporate board room. Our experiences – good and bad – can be shared with millions of people instantly. Bad press spreads quickly, virally, and without the support of traditional media channels. How should firms deal with the technology-enabled social forces of groundswell?
I haven’t had cable television is almost a year. It is too expensive and I simply do not extract enough value from the bundles of services and networks to justify the cost. I now have a very good high speed internet connection and rely on Hulu, Netflix, and iTunes for content. Am I the exception to the rule? Or, do I represent an emerging trend?
Everyone on the planet knows that Google is a major force to be reckoned with, permeating dozens of industries and dominating markets… but what were the key factors behind Google’s early success?
Over the past few months there has been a lot of buzz in the User Experience (UX) community around “Lean UX.” This is fascinating to me as a UX designer and a business student. Last year at the Information Architecture (IA) Summit I shared my experience as a b-school student and designer. I shared my opinion that our community should be drawing more heavily from the field of Operations Management (OM). Lean UX is a perfect example of converging design and management concepts. UX designers are pulling directly from OM principles like lean and businesses are employing design and development methodologies like user experience and agile.
The operative word in “crowd sourcing” is CROWD. Without users, followers, customers, or community, what exactly are you sourcing? One of the key challenges facing all Internet start-ups is finding an audience. While brick-and-mortars may drive in window shoppers and foot traffic, eBusinesses need to build an audience through other means.