I really enjoyed Next09 in Hamburg this week - a very impressive European conference with good logistics and a strong local German business presence. Well done to all involved.

I was asked to talk about User-driven companies, so I looked at how we can move beyond surface level user-centricity to a more consistent people engagement strategy starting with employees. I have embedded the slides below (see this link for the video) and then a summary of the talk.

I summary, I argued:

• User-driven Innovation and co-design are great; plus, it is a real source of competitive advantage and can build closer relationships with customers and partners.
• Open source communities and crowdsourcing are great co-production models if they can be successfully applied beyond the technology world.
• We already have some good user-driven examples, such as Digg, Dell Ideastorm and even potato crisps, but how do we take this further and 'bake in' this model into business culture in general?
• The way Twentieth Century companies talk to customers is problematic. They treat them as a mass, a herd, to be segmented and messaged. The notion of CRM and call centres involves spending lots of money (and wasting your customers' time) to keep your customers at arms length, and in many cases to make them hate you. How can we change that? Doc Searls' model of VRM might be one way. Are there others?
• The downturn is an opportunity to change this. As the tide recedes, it is exposing many business models as too costly. As Umair Haque mentioned elsewhere at the conference, using VC money to 'buy' audience or customers is no longer a good option. Flat, responsive structures will succeed better than the model of mass marketing and segmentation. What can we learn from Threadless, for example, that can be applied to larger businesses?
• Indeed, what is the goal of a company? Is it purely profit maximisation in the short-term, pure plunder or perhaps sustainable income over the long-term? In the past, business motives were often more balanced between profit and social status or respect.. For example, Hamburg was one of the principal cities of the Hanseatic League, which was an incredibly powerful trading network than spanned northern Europe, and was a successful model of co-opetition and shared value creation, rather than just short-term individual gain. Many corporates, such as Unilever and Cadbury began with very strong social as well as financial goals. Even banks have traditionally been seen as a profession with codes of conduct and a long-term custodian role in the financial sector. It is only recently that executives such as Sir Fred Goodwin have got the balance between their social status and their value extraction so badly wrong. He is not a popular or respected man, despite being rich.
• If we want to create truly user-driven companies, then we need to start on the inside and recast their relationship with both customers and employees. There is no point being open at the edges if you treat your employees like machines - you simply cannot deliver on the promise that way. Harnessing people power inside and out means allowing staff to be human and talk as humans, and using them to drive better relationships with customers.
• Companies that can do this are likely to succeed, but they also need to place value and faith in their ecosystem and networks to create a sense of common purpose (this may or may not be manifested in a brand identity) and create and share value around their mission.