Thenewnewmedia

For the past few years, I have been doing quite a bit of research on user-based innovation. It seems to be all the rage right now to talk about user-generated content but in fact, users have been contributing to the innovative process for a very long time. And there has been a considerable amount of research that has been done on how users contributed their expertise to tangible products such as surf boards by tinkering with these products and then offering their ideas to manufacturers. Researchers such as Eric von Hippel at MIT found that these tinkerers were really good at developing variations on products and formed communities where they could trade ideas back and forth with one another. They were not in this for commercial purposes but more for the fun of it and to establish their reputations as experts. Von Hippel called it the 'democratization of innovation.'

We of course are in a different era where we have a great digital platform on which to develop tons of new content and many of us do generate our own content in blogs like this one and also on websites like Facebook and MySpace. But I would like to take this farther. I think that there are companies out there and I have done some research on them which are leading the charge in changing how all  companies are organized, innovate, develop services and relate to their customers. I call these companies user-centric because they are developed overwhelmingly to service users/customers. They have no products for the most part and have a minimalist kind of organization. Their users are their raison d'etre (reason for being).

I will give you an example from a company based right here in New York City. It's called Upoc, and has been around for a long time . In fact, it was the first company in North America to have direct connections to all the carriers for facilitating text messaging and in the early days of mobile text messaging, Upoc was generating a significant percentage of the SMS traffic in the US. In any case, the core of the company is a mobile social networking service which enables users to send text messages to their friends and start any number of mobile groups on an unlimited range of topics. Astonishingly, Upoc has about 40,000 of these groups on every topic you can think of.

So why is Upoc so interesting to me? It is a company that has no real products except the content that users generate from interacting with one another. Its services and technology platform are desgined to help users do what they do best - create content and build communities. Not only do these users generate content, in a company like Upoc they also give the management constant feedback so that the company gets better and can service its users better. Upoc's management actually listens to these users and implements some of their suggestions. All of this could not happen without a strong technology platform which lets users communicate with one another. Upoc's platform is very complex and allows users and its partners (the carriers and media companies) to take advantage of the platform.

Most of the communities which use Upoc are made up of people who don't spend much time in front of computers - - nurses, truck drivers, firemen but still need to constantly communicate with one another using their mobile phones. There are also other types of professionals who use Upoc on the go which include real estate agents and doctors. These people work hard at community building and police themselves to keep out spammers and people who deliberately disrupt conversations or conduct illegal business. Sometimes, Upoc's management team gets involved and has one of their team act as a community manager to moderate the conversation. What is great about these communities is that everyone feels welcomed and is encouraged to participate and that these users feel like they 'own' the company. 

What I have just described in a nutshell is a company that is so different than traditional companies. Think about it. Companies we all know and love are in the business of developing products and pushing  them out to their customers. They may try to get customers' opinions but really they decide what's best and send it out to the marketplace. These companies have top-down very structured organizations while Upoc has a small management team to run the show and in fact, the 40,000 communities are an important part of the Upoc organization. What does it mean to be a manager in this kind of company? We are just beginning to find out.  Traditional companies are still based in a limited physical business environment while companies like Upoc exist virtually for the most part and can seamlessly connect to their users on a local level (New York for example) and on a national level. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg and I think that changing companies doesn't happen overnight. I think it  will be a while before you see traditional organizations doing more than setting up a social network in their organizations because it's the thing to do rather than rethinking the whole way they do business. Most companies especially when the economy is slow, go 'back to basics' and stick to what they know has worked in the past.

 I will be sharing more of my ideas about this topic but would love to hear what you think.  In my next blogpost, I'll be focusing on Indaba Music, a true Silicon Alley company based on the Bowery in Lower Manhattan.

Nina