Killer Question - Could you customize a mass product?

From Phil McKinney's Blog, 

"When things get tough, the common reaction is to scale back and standardize the processes.  The objective is to take costs out of the business.  What would happened if you went the opposite direction?  Rather than standardize, why not customize?"

This is an interesting question for me, since my company mass produces a product that is "customizable" by our customers through software configuration.  This isn't really an aftermarket for our product, since the product isn't immediately useful in it's default state.

But if I had to think about ways that our product could be customized, the list might look something like this:

1. We could allow customers to upload specific configuration options to their order, and we'd load those before the product was shipped.  This might make it easier for them to deploy the products in remote offices without sending a specialized technician to the site.
2. While it wouldn't enhance the functionality of the product, we could offer options on the color of the faceplates on the products.  Some companies have corporate colors (ie. Yahoo - purple, UPS - brown, Wake Forest - black/gold) and this might be a desirable look in their data centers.  
3. if our selling partners identified their primary target markets, we could potentially create collateral (training, co-logo'd whitepapers, etc.) that aligned with those segments.  This would reduce their costs and increase their focus, and we could probably do it with minimal additional costs.

This is an interesting exercise, because while some these ideas could change the overall experience, they also introduce additional conflicts or problems (distribution, etc.).  I need to think about this some more, to see if there aren't more obvious or impactful ways this could be applied to my company.  I may find that this exercise works better for new companies looking to create a niche (or adjacency) to an existing market, rather than trying to change an existing product/service mix.

Question(s) of the Week - Killer Questions

One of the comments you hear frequently mentioned throughout all the doomsday news reports is that the greatest innovation often comes from down times instead of good times.  I'd tend to agree with that..."our backs are against the wall"...."necessity is the mother of all invention", etc, etc..

At my previous company, when I was working in one of their Incubating Technology groups, I used to frequently read Phil McKinney's Blog.  Not only does Phil lead one of the large innovation groups at HP, but he also gives back quite a bit of time to explain and explore the lessons he's learned about innovation in his career.  I still subscribe to his Killer Innovations podcast, but I had lost track of it as I changed jobs and got heavily invested in the MBA program.  But recently I found myself listening to the podcast again, and also spending some time thinking about Phil's Killer Questions.

When I first started this blog, I considered a segment called "Decision of the Week".   But the more I read things like Umair Haque's 21st Century Growth Manifesto, the more I think my time would be better used in trying to weave together Phil's questioning model with Umair's problem structure model and a few sprinkles of my ideas (and hopefully my classmates). Focusing on today's decisions may just be an exercise in extending 20th century thinking that isn't going to work much longer.