“Customer to be in CONTROL of Service” – Digital Inventive Pattern #1

“The Internet Is Under New Management. YOURS” – boldly proclaims the full-page ad of Yahoo in today’s Time of India newspaper. It is a message—an eye opener—to all the entrepreneurs in the digital world to think beyond the usual business rhetoric that customer is an important stakeholder. In fact, the customer ‘controls’ your business—he(she) shapes it the way he desires, organizes it as per his convenience and even chooses to pay as per his affordability. C K Prahalad calls it ‘Co-Creation’ (each individual customer as a partner in the creation of his products/services with the firm.) For internet merchants it might manifest as personalization of websites as in ‘My Yahoo’ or ‘iGoogle’. Over the last 20 years of digital evolution and the emergence of internet businesses, this has become the dominant business paradigm that governs every customer-facing services business in the virtual world. It made me think why can’t we consider this as one of the Inventive Principles in our Structured Thinking methodology.

Putting this into the TRIZ mould, the contradiction can be specified as:
Customer To Be In Control (of his Experience) X Service Provider To Be In Control (of his Service)

Can we list down the Inventive Solutions (triggers, to be precise) to help us resolve this contradiction?
1. Personalization
2. ?
3. ?

Let’s think!

Regards,
KG Krishna
(C) Copyright 2009, KG Krishna
Gender Neutrality is assumed wherever 'He' or 'She' is used