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Before the Thanksgiving Holiday we discussed how Uber and Spotify hooked up to allow passengers booking transportation through the Uber app are now able to control what they listen to during their ride. We discussed how this is a throwback to customizing your vehicle digitally, but could spawn an entirely new kind of connected transportation experience (one that many automotive companies are still attempting to define themselves).

Even after our stellar post, this announcement may seem like a “so what” kind of moment. Pull back the covers a bit though; it may be one of the first examples of a much larger trend that is going to affect many connected products – including the car.

What Makes Your Car, “Your Car”?

What makes your phone YOUR phone? …. What makes your bedroom YOUR Bedroom, even if it is at a hotel? ……What makes it YOUR experience?

We have been working with clients for years to answer these and other “Personalization” questions. It is actually a topic that we ask in our standard “Introduction to the Connected World” lecture or early in our Connected Strategy Development Engagements with our Fortune 500 clients.

Conversation typically dances around a few themes:

• Material Customization vs. Electronic Configuration – How easy is it to reconfigure the product to give similar but varying experiences?
• Individual Product Uses vs. Sharing – Does the product get used by many or just a few?

What is eventually drawn out is that an evolution is taking place:

Mechanical Customization -> Mechanical Configuration -> Electronic Configuration -> Multi Profile Configuration

It is also the reason we got so excited when we heard of the pending Uber announcement.  Uber is starting to make any ride “your ride”. By allowing customers to link their music profile to the Uber vehicle they covered one profile aspect. With heated seat settings, seat position, lighting, preferred routes and many more, this vision could make every Uber ride a distinct ride that has been made for you. Customer Relationship Management meets service experience. It is really big!

What if others started to do the same?

• Your company – Shared office buildings that adjust to fit you: desk height, lighting, temperature, auto-transfer calls from mobile to a desk/speaker phone.
• Your hotel – Hotel rooms that remember how you use them: Spontaneously setting the temperature to your known habits. Turning on the lamps that you always have on when you are in your room. Automatically syncing your Netflix account to their beautiful smart TV. It is your room now, maybe much like the one you have (or the one you wish you had) at home!

Still think connectivity is a passing trend? Think it is a small feature in your product? Think again! It will, and probably is, disrupting your industry!

Feel free to comment back… Who else is already making an experience, YOUR experience?

Enterprise innovation leaders and entrepreneurs recognize that some of the best ideas are created as derivatives of other ideas. We refer to this as “Idea Spawning”.   Similar to upstarts “pivoting” several times prior to locking in on an offering or business model that the market can appreciate, ideas often need refinement to find their real value.

It is the concept of Idea Spawning that has encouraged us to launch a sporadic “Throw-back Thursday” campaign. We highlight ideas that have been derived from old concepts. Some of these will be our own ideas that we have previously shared in publications, journals, webinars/conferences, whitepapers, or our blog (available at https://www.cgsadvisors.com/) . Other ideas will be from outside sources that we feel need to get attention.