The TJAM event definitely falls into my ‘unforgettable’ category for two reasons – the generation of 800 decent, coherent ideas from customers generated throughout the day, and the buzz of anticipation from developers as we showed some of our customer insight.
Nick Lansley, Head of R&D at Tesco.com
Tesco.com wanted to find ways of making online grocery shopping rather more exciting than it is right now and, in the current climate, help their customers spend less whilst making grocery shopping easier and faster. They chose open innovation because they could not afford the time and effort to create up to 100 different applications in house. In the T-JAM process developers were invited to put the time and effort into creating new Tesco.com grocery home shopping applications in return for being part of affiliates scheme, making money from their app’s success.
However the first part of the Jam was designed to capture insights from current customers, creating a deep wellspring of 800 new opportunities to inspire and inform the 150+ developers who turned up. With agency Happen facilitating, these insights were captured, voted on and presented to the developers who took them away as their raw material.
The winner was an imagined device called a “T-Scanner” that a customer could have on their keyring – a barcode scanner which would be used to ‘collect’ barcodes of grocery products they liked as they went about their daily lives. There were plenty of other good ideas requiring applications rather than hardware, and amongst the favourites were a mobile phone app (for their mobile phone whatever make and model) and the desire for a 3D virtual Tesco grocery store.
Tesco.com is busy developing its API and working with many of the successful T-JAM developers. For the complete up to date information on the Tesco API join Tesco.com’s innovation support forum at http://www.techfortesco.com/forum
