Why investing in Customers is Key to New Value Creation
We invited Simply Do Ideas Senior Business Manager, Joseph Murphy along to our recent event 'Innovation, Technology and Human Capital' with keynote speaker Michael Schrage of MIT - one of the world’s most innovative thought leaders on innovation.
Read Joseph’s top take-aways and thoughts on the event below:
What comes first - the Miner or the Coal?
The coal - right?
BeTheSpark welcomed MIT and Sloan Management School fellow Michael Schrage to the DevOpsGuys office in Cardiff's Capital Tower on Tuesday to deliver an honest and thought-provoking talk to a closed audience of approx. 50 people.
Michael’s emphasis was squarely on the Miner, not the coal; The Driver, not Ford's ground-breaking assembly line and the User, happily clicking away, rather than the Search Engine.
It seems obvious. Focus on making your customers better at what they do, and they become better customers, lengthening and strengthening Customer Lifetime Value, marketing’s 'Holy Grail'.
But then, when we set the Key Performance Indicators for teams or a company the emphasis can often be on what we extract from the customer financially rather than this broader, and potentially more valuable, investment in human capital.
This shift in perspective certainly provided me with food for thought as we engage with an eclectic mix of companies and educational establishments through our ideation platform, where "users [can] create value for users."
Not only this, but it's also crucial that we too invest in tools and processes that enable our customers to become better at turning ideas into solutions, creating new value for themselves or clients and companies within their business community.
Bearing all this in mind, then, does the chicken come first?
If you are interested in finding out more the full video will be available via BeTheSpark week commencing 11th June.
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