Where does your offering start and end?  Where should it start and end?  What could you do at the borders of your existing offering to help it deliver a more delightful user experience?

The people behind the Everquest online fantasy video game asked themselves these questions and came up with something pretty special:

While playing EverQuest II just type /pizza
and a web browser will launch the online ordering section of
pizzahut.com. Fill in your info and just kick back until fresh pizza is
delivered straight to your door.

How cool is that?  Pizza on demand isn’t a traditional video game feature like better graphics and more complex story lines, but it is an amazing way to enhance the video game experience.  And it’s a good example of how customer-centric innovation doesn’t always need to be something big and scary.  It might just be about asking the right questions.

I’ve always worked in product development.  It’s an intensely social environment where people are constantly telling each other stories to get their point across.  Accordingly, I’ve probably sat through at least one PowerPoint presentation for each day I’ve spent in the office. 

It’s often painful.  So painful, in fact, that next time someone stands up in a meeting and begins reading directly off their PowerPoint prezo, I swear I’m going to every-so-politely inform them that the last person to read to me out loud was my mother and that procedure ceased circa 1974.  Trust me, I can read, and if there’s some text around, I’d rather digest it myself than try to listen to you and read it myself at the same time.

Here’s the problem:  PowerPoint wasn’t designed as a tool for documenting complex thoughts or piles of information.  As a wise man once said, trains of thought need tracks.  And those tracks are best constructed of prose, which is what Microsoft Word is for.  So when people use PowerPoint as a medium for complex and complete sentences, tables, lists of bullets, etc… they’re not helping their story or their audience get to a good place. 

Cliff Atkinson shows on his blog that removing text from PowerPoint improves both information retention and transfer.  And I recall Seth Godin advising that we use no more than six or so words on any PowerPoint slide.  Use a photo or drawing instead, he says.  Removing text from your PowerPoint decks forces you to become an active storyteller, and that’s fine, because that’s what we humans do when we’re around one another. 

So.  Word = Prose Documentation.  PowerPoint = Active Storytelling.  If you need both outcomes, use each program to write up two different documents.

As of late I’ve been getting reacquainted with the thinking of Professor Eric von Hippel of MIT, who studies the innovation process.  It’s intriguing stuff.  Here’s an excerpt from his paper "Breakthroughs to Order at 3M":

Not all users are created equal with respect to the development of commercially-important innovations and innovation prototypes.  Research shows that almost all user-developed ideas and prototypes of general commercial interest tend to be developed by “Lead Users” – that is, users that: (1) expect to get high benefit from an innovation and so have a strong incentive to innovate and; (2) that are ahead of a target market with respect to one or more important trends…

The point is, if you want to find users that are actively exploring and testing new ideas, it is a waste of time to survey users in the center of the target market.  Instead, you must develop methods to seek out users that are at the leading edge with respect to needs that are important to that market – even if such lead users are rare and hard to find – because that is where interesting user idea generation and innovation is concentrated.

You can see more of his writing here.

Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) and James Surowiecki (The Wisdom of Crowds) are having a fascinating exchange of letters on Slate this week.  It’s a worthwhile read if you’re at all interested in how to structure decision making processes to better foster innovation.

"In life there is nothing more foolish than inventing."

– James Watt

If you ask a group of mechanical engineers to create a land mine detection system, they’ll likely develop a system which prods the ground.  Electrical engineers might create a detector using magnetism.  In contrast, the biologists at Aresa Biodetection are using a color-shifting, genetically modified plant to signal the presence of land mines:

In the presence of chemical compounds released by explosives into the soil, the Aresa plant turns pink.  While there are certainly ecological and political barriers to implementing this solution, one has to admire its elegance.

If you’re a hammer, the world looks like a nail.  Aresa’s plant is a wonderful example of how innovative solutions often arise when technical domains and professional disciplines collide.  While you’re probably not creating landmine detection systems, you could be doing this today.  For example, if your goal is to create an innovative, record-setting promotional campaign, why not add a nuclear engineer to your existing marcomm team?  Mix some screwdrivers in with the hammers and good stuff will happen.