This week's reading on "Knowing a Winning Business Idea When You See One" is very interesting and useful.
It surprises me how many innovative ideas there are out there that don't take into consideration what this article deems to be the "most commonly used," but "least obvious" lever of utility - that is customer productivity. The idea has been increasingly emerging when examining social innovation success stories. A great example is the SMS crop service for Indian farmers deployed by Thomson Reuteurs. This service brings commodity prices, crop, and weather data at a farmer's fingertips. Having this information truly enhances the farmers' [customers'] productivity so they can make conscientious harvesting decisions, not rotate crops when it could be detrimental to soil fertility, etc. Furthermore, I was surprised to learn that this is so low-cost that three months of information sharing via SMS is approximately the same price as a Starbucks latte in the United States!
Another point this article highlights is the need for a greater volume as the nature of the goods becomes more "knowledge-intensive." In the case of this SMS crop service, there is more definitely more value if more people are using it. But this rests on the customer productivity foundation. More people will use it if they are convinced that it will enhance productivity.
Here is a link to the video explaining the SMS crop service: http://careers.thomsonreuters.com/#/?hero=732305%7C%7C%7C%7C
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