Strategy + Business magazine has a nice article on co-creation featuring Cisco and P&G among others (disclosure: Cisco is a Banner client). It’s a good advocacy piece on getting the customer involved.

We’ve seen the benefits of this ourselves. Where as before we might have done the usual focus group thing (get 8 people in a room, show them some ideas and then cry when they don’t like them) more recently we’ve taken a different approach.

Instead of the all-or-nothing, customer says yes/no group, we create a series of hot housing sessions. In these we present some rough thinking to a group (no ads or cardboard) and then get them to work with us on refining and adding to that thinking. We then develop these ideas in the hour after the group and take this evolved thinking into another group. We repeat this exercise over a day or two.

The result is battle-hardened ideas that have benefited from customer creativity and insights. These ideas then form the basis for the creative ideas that follow.

Ok, install at your own risk but Firefox’s march toward’s a full 2.0 release has taken another step forward. The beta 2 release is available here.

As with any pre-release software, you’ll have to take the rough with the smooth in terms of stability. However, I’ve been using Firefox 2.0 on the Mac since it was in alpha and it’s been remarkably stable and well behaved. One thing to watch out for, the new version is unlikely to play nice with all your themes and extensions.

Now if only they could make it as good as Opera…