Vindication is sweet! Its one thing to be tooting the horn for customer-driven innovation, its another for one of the leading exponents of innovation to be actually practicing it.
Can Innovation Lead to Evolution? Toyota believes it can and wants to invite you and I to a place where we can join together to think of breakthrough ways of making the world better. Aptly labeled - Toyota Why Not - we can submit original ideas here for others to see and share. And what's more there is an incentive as well. The co-creation site promises that winners of the best ideas will:
- get a private tour of Toyota's largest manufacturing plant in Georgetown, KY
- meet some of the country's most influential innovators
- have their expenses paid - airfare, hotel, meals, etc.
There are several features of this customer-driven innovation initiative that are very appealing.
- Toyota has made a conscious attempt to engage its visitors with the entire ecosystem in which it adds value.
- Idea contributors are asked to consider the domains of water, land, air, safety, energy, and community before submitting their ideas. This is refreshingly different from attempts where companies merely try to engage consumers with their core offering.
- Toyota is using this site both as a consumer engagement tool and as a quasi marketing/PR tool. For example, if you decide to post an entry in the community part of the ecosystem, you will also be presented with a tab for Toyota innovations in that space. And if you do click on the community tab for instance, you will learn, among other things, that Toyota supports The National Center for Family Literacy, and has launched 241 initiatives, in 47 cities, in 29 states.
- Why Not is a very compelling invitation to participate - it does make you want to shed your anxieties that your idea may not be good enough and want to participate. Its an invitation to be a visionary - shades of Bernard Shaw!
- Tire playground - children can have fun and landfills get to breathe
- Finding ways to pack landfills better so they take less space
- Coming up with a fix to prevent water wastage due to broken fire hydrants
While Toyota deserves kudos for continuing to set the standard for ingenuity and innovativeness, a casual conversation with my associates skilled in the art of consumer engagement, suggests room for improvement.
Toyota Why Not could have done a few things differently:
- There is not much room for playfulness, its all very linear and straightforward, you enter, you read, you contribute, you share, you leave. Making room for playfulness we believe will increase participation and the quality of ideas.
- For example, serious play concepts can be applied with experts supplying the ideas in each domain and the consumers playing with them, or kicking them around in a serious kind of way.
- Contributors are not able to interact with each other in real time to build and improve on each others' ideas.
- A round robin format with the higher rated innovations being served up as raw material for the next round of brainstorming and refining would actually improve the application potential of the ideas.
- Lastly, where are you Toyota, why so silent? Your executives should also be part of the conversation - it would be beneficial for both the contributors and for the company.
Leave a comment