Social Business Design – A person summary (Chapter 8)

Chapter 7 – Social Product Development

1. Advocating for Social Business Design (SBD) :

• Opening up the creative process beyond organizational boundaries achieves a far richer set of inputs.
• Having a bureaucratic, centralized product development team is no longer an efficient or productive application of the resources at hand needed to solve customer problems
• The developed online world has the biggest sources of talent.

2. Social development cycle

• Begins with a collection of implicit user contribution, leveraging something Internet luminary John Battelle call the Database of Intentions.
• Companies automate real-time feedback loops to identify customers behaviours, desires, frequent activities, and other information that can be played back for future users
• In later iteration, it elicit explicit contributions on desired colours, features, and other usual attributes

3. Comparison between traditional product development and social product development (SDP)

• Most improvement from SDP will be incremental
• Risks are often lower
• Major shifts required by the organization such as
  • encouraging unintended users
  • mass customization
  • more deliberate transformation of organization strategy and organization

Personal Note :

a. Playing the devil advocate, are they any cons to social business design for all its promises ? Can’t think of any at this point in time but will have to keep this in the back of my mind.

b. Is SBD suitable for all products and even services ? Another point to ponder on.

c. Agree that online world has the biggest sources of talent, question will be how to engage and whether the technique of engagement will vary with different countries, cultures and demographics.

d. Didn’t quite appreciate the section of social development cycle but I found the Database of Intentions interesting. Previously, I tend to see the field (as in search) in isolation from the signal. This chart showed the relationship of the various fields and signal in an easy to understand. Felt quite stupid after reading it as it should be something that I already know. But then, I figured that is the purpose of reading widely not just to gain new knowledge but also to see the various representation of it. An updated chart can be found here. Going through the comments on that post, I found additional signals such as “What I read”, “What I have”, “What I need”, “Who I am” and i would add to the list “What I know”.  

e. The last section of the chapter on the comparison of traditional product development versus social product development left me with a strange feeling after reading it.  While I was appreciate what each row (comparison), but have difficulty trying to understand the entire table as a whole. Perhaps I am too much process oriented person. The product development process that I am familiar is as follows : Idea Generation → Screening → Idea Evaluation → Development → Commercialization (Source : Marketing Creating and Delivering value, 4th Edition, Quester, Mcguiggan, perreault, mccarthy, pg 309). This would be an outstanding item for me to follow up.