Unilever just announced that they will practice what we call open innovation. The article now requires registration, but in short, Unilever plans to “integrate social media into product development”- to interact with its consumers to create products that are exactly what their customers want.

I salute Unilever’s move! While I’m sure that they are adept at using focus groups, interviews, surveys, and many other ways to research their consumer’s opinions, this takes it to a whole new level of interaction. We at chocri have been practicing open innovation from the very beginning, but that’s because interacting with our customers is inherent to our business model anyways. What Unilever is building here, could be the first step to not only listen to their consumers individual wishes, but who knows, maybe someday be able to react to it individually, too.

Innovation is inherent to mass customization. Every time a user creates one of the 10 billion different possible combinations on our site, that’s innovation. Compared to that, innovation at mass production companies (like Unilever, Kraft, you name it) is by the company, with comparatively very little consumer input. Which, witness me saying, is also a good thing! Many inventions and innovations most people never dared to dream up. Or maybe dared to dream, but not to demand. How many people did you hear say six years ago: “I’d like a website where I can tell everyone what I’m doing all the time, and put up my pictures so everyone of my friends can see them, and so I can see everyone’s pictures”? Even if you told them that you have this idea, many probably would have thought you’re crazy (btw, if you did, please talk to me, I want to benefit of your vision!). Today, more people spend time on Facebook than with Google.
(Also read this article: http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2010/02/11/bolt-peters-remote-research/)

So-called Breakthrough Innovation does not tend to come from consumers, it comes from creative, visionary individuals and teams, both within cooperations and as startups. On the other end, there’s customer innovation, which tends to be Incremental Innovation - I’d like to have copy & paste on my phone - bam, there it is a few months later. Both types of innovation are important!

Mass Customization/ Co-Creation spurs innovation for it has the incremental innovation built in (with every chocolate bar you make…), plus the company and the customer are already talking, so more incremental innovation ideas are being communicated, e.g. on the modules that are offered in the customization (in the case of chocri, e.g. those are the toppings). But that cannot be it. There has to be breakthrough innovation in the mass customization industry as well. Lots of it will come from new startups, but existing startups also need to be open to it. Whether it be new products that could be customized, or new concepts jumping off of mass customization. Take what Jana Eggers, CEO of Spreadshirt, said in this interview: “What I hope happens is that we take the industry and think about what the customers want from it”. Spreadshirt has taken the mass customization concept and expanded it with their “partnership concept” - now a much larger growth driver than mass customization alone.

At chocri, Franz and Micha’s breakthrough innovation was the idea of customized chocolate bar itself - prior to chocri, there was just no such thing. If you’d like to see some incremental innovation in terms of the chocolate bars created, check out the bars the bloggers made for the blog race: beautiful, delicious bars, everyone different from the other. Also, we practice what Unilever is getting into now - open innovation - take all the many surveys and quests for your input we throw at our dear customers regularly (thanks for throwing back!). Innovation makes us better, and we’d like to be the best we can be!

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