5 days: 5 issues. Experience Academy Issue 2 - Scalable experiences |
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Nokia’s Cliff Crosby told that he knows everything there is to know about the Nokia N95. When someone sitting next to him in the airplane asks about this phone, he can not only explain everything in 10 minutes, but do it in such a way that this person will also want one. The problem is: how can you replicate this experience millions and millions of times? How do you make the experience scalable? The same issue came to the fore in the presentation of the Academia Barilla-case of Gian Luigi Zenti. How can you replicate experiences and reconcile the principles of scale and uniqueness?
Uta Birkmayer of Xsense explained the issue somewhat differently. She imagined a tree in which we can either grow fruit of hang ornaments. When hanging ornaments we can control the output because it is us who hangs the same ornaments in every tree, so in terms of scalability this would be a great option. But the problem is that ornaments become dusty and have to be cleaned, refreshed or replaced once in a while. Fruits grow all out of themselves and they stay fresh if you take good care of them.
However, when you just let the fruits grow, you have to learn to let go of some of the control. Like Lego has had to learn. Fans of Lego have published over 40 books on Mindstorms (one of Lego’s products) and not one has been published by Lego. There are Lego User Groups, fans organize events that range from 40.000 to 100.000 visitors, they have organized themselves in online user communities that discuss products, advice and issues (at the moment a big issue is being green for example) and around 2003 specific titles were implemented for specific types of users; professionals for example are users who make a living using Lego but over whom Lego has no influence whatsoever. As Mark Hansen of Lego remarked when he told about the fans who had put no less than 220.000 designs of Lego trains online: “There is no way that Lego could have put so many trains online”.
So organizations seem to have to make a choice. On the one hand there is the scalability but on the other hand one has to realize that many experiences take place in the niches or the so-called ‘long tail’. On the one hand you can reach a huge scale when customers are given the freedom to express themselves and create their own experiences, but on the other hand this means that one has to let go of the need for absolute control and trust them. Or to return to the fruit metaphor: you can’t force the growth of an apple but you can support it.
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A good example of collaboration by the customer around the customer. could the same concept of co-creation work for a real community - like a town or city for example. if the concept, or system, was constructed in the most ethical way that is humanly possible in the first place, in terms of governance, could it not become a powerful way to galvanise local consumers around their own individual communities? and if it became possible, through the enabling power of technology, to reward the good behaviour of that community’s participants in such a way that made them want to behave better and better and better, is there not a chance that an upward spiral might occur?
anything that contributed to the participant’s own individual health or well being; their families and friends health and well being; or the community’s health and well being could and maybe should find it’s own reward. is this a transformational step too far?