What can we learn about innovation from computer programming?

Someone said that the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly, but it doesn't know it so it flies anyway. True or not, an interesting analogy is what many computer programmers have been doing since decades: they had no clue on how to create working computer programs with the aid of user input, so they just went on doing it anyway.

Anders Gustafsson, professor at the Service Research Center at Karlstad University, excellently lays out the cornerstones of Service Innovation process in this video, finalizing in the levels of service maintenance; service improvements and radical service innovation.

Professor Lars Witell at the same institution, exemplifies with microwave accuracy the range and variation of user involvement and how it can be put to work.

About 30 years ago (or more), a method of making radically new programs with prototypes came into fashion for PC programmers - as opposed to the traditional mainframe style with a planned and managed development process. It was called prototyping, the same thing that is done today with agile methods like Scrum and others. In prototyping, you have frequent user meetings and after every meeting you create a new better prototype of your program - as in input to the next meeting. The users is clearly a co-creator, participates during the whole creation process and benefits from constantly running the prototype in its context. I'd say this is a good example of radical innovation with customer co-creation, if now a computer program can be radical.

Secondly, in the same decade it also came into fashion for the users to organize themselves into user associations, loosely linked to the software company owning the program.The software companies quickly gave them the role of filtering which suggested developments to implement, and which to not. The big advantage is that you by definition implement the most valuable and (in the future) most widely used improvements, and the customers will never complain - as opposed to the traditional style of selling an endless amount of customized functions, getting your software into a swamp where it eventually can't evolve any more. I'd say this is a good example of a well defined process for service improvements, with the customer association acting as a focus group.

Thirdly, with the wast number of users created by the IBM PC boom at the mid 80's, came the invention of the user Helpdesk. It's designed to relieve computer specialists from solving endless and annoying user problems - but also to give them feedback on common user problems, that then can be fixed once and for all. This is a well defined process, and I'd say a good example of service maintenance based on (a kind of) formatted customer interviews.

So the bumblebee flied. As I see it, parts of the computer industry has come to be a forerunner in using these methods - not knowing they did and that we are discussing them as models for the whole service industry today. I wouldn't be surprised if there where more to find, if someone examined these forerunners systematically. Possibly this role has now been overtaken by an even newer and less tradition-bound IT sector. The smartphone app industry? The internet-enabled gadget industry? The gaming industry? Go and look - and tell me!