Innovation Through Customer Collaboration

July 29, 2013

Lean Enterprise Institute faculty member Steve Bell shows you how to examine and improve your activities for learning the Voice of the Customer.

Henry Ford is purported to have said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said “faster horses.”

Whether or not, Ford ever made the statement, it captures an important question companies must answer today in the face of accelerating innovation, says Steve Bell: “Is it enough to ask the customer or do we have to do more?”

Bell, a Lean Enterprise Institute faculty member, author of Run Grow Transform, and co-author of the Shingo Prize-winning Lean IT, helps you understand four critical challenges in this 90-minute learning session:

1. Examine your own Voice of the Customer activity and identify opportunities for improvement

2. Understand why what the customer says is usually not enough

3. Learn about some of the new Voice of Customer techniques that are now enabled through technology

4. Answer the question “What can I do on Monday morning?” to know customers better

See Steve Bell at the 2014 Lean Transformation Summit, click here to learn more.

Written by:

Steve Bell

About Steve Bell

Steve launched LeanAgileNGO.org in 2010 to improve operational excellence and innovation among non-governmental aid organizations (NGOs). The organization’s mission is to help them learn, scale, and spread continuous innovation, improvement, and learning across their locations, programs, projects, and partners. LeanAgileNGO (and its partners) provide a platform for large global NGOS,…

Read more about Steve Bell

About

Steve Bell is a pioneer of Lean IT and Lean Digitization, applying principles and practices through a method-agnostic approach, drawing on a variety of disciplines— including Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, DevOps, Lean Startup, Kata, Design Thinking, ITSM, Visual Management (Obeya), and Strategy Deployment (Hoshin Kanri) —as appropriate to the culture and situation, to coach and support leaders to develop high-performance practices and organizational learning capabilities. He is the author of Lean IT, Run Grow Transform, Lean Enterprise Systems, and numerous other published works. In 2011 Steve was awarded the Shingo Prize for Research and Professional Publication. His career spans the evolution of enterprise-wide information technology, with hands-on experience in continuous improvement and innovation across most industries. Steve and his partner Karen Whitely Bell are co-founders of Digital Lean Strategies, LLC (formerly Lean IT Strategies). Together they have co-authored numerous articles, and recently contributed a chapter on high performance management to Accelerate: The Science Behind DevOps, by Jez Humble, Gene Kim, and Nicole Forsgren PhD. They are currently working on their next book, on the Digital Lean Enterprise. They are also co-founders of Lean4NGO (LinkedIn Group “Lean Thinking for NGOs and Nonprofits) whose mission is to make Lean Thinking accessible to humanitarian aid organizations, improving NGO operational efficiency (use of scarce resources) and effectiveness (improved outcomes) to benefit the three billion people living at the “”bottom of the pyramid”” on less than $2 a day.