Longer term, I see V-Jam becoming a franchise and a generic term for ongoing Virgin Atlantic/customer co-innovation.
Dr Fergus Boyd, Head of IT Innovation, Virgin Atlantic
V-Jam brought together Virgin Atlantic and its customers as co-innovators. Like most businesses, the airline had not traditionally sought collaborations with end-users that go further than seeking their views. V-Jam was the chance for Virgin Atlantic to gain fresh insights for new web applications and have them developed by the ‘V-Jammers’.
These concrete gains for company and customer re-balance an unequal relationship, making it an attractive and exciting process for both. Six social media projects were born in a day-long workshop which brought together Virgin Atlantic staff and customers, web developers and social media experts . The successful V-Jammers have kept their intellectual property and Virgin Atlantic have first refusal on licensing or purchasing the products.
Virgin Atlantic has calculated that the return on investment has been an impressive 10:1, better value than the traditional route of using a commercial third party for system development. For this cost, Virgin Atlantic is now developing ideas that are more radical than internally-generated innovations, with the confidence that user-led innovations deliver something customers genuinely want, developed by people with passion for their ideas.
