An argument against listening to your customers… is a post from: co>innovative

Cloudcrowd: Another interesting entrant in the labor as a service market. Similar to Mechanical Turk, the system “helps companies reduce overhead, increase efficiency, and lower costs by breaking large projects into smaller tasks, and distributing them via a proprietary online platform that brings work and workers together.” Types of work they facilitate are data processing, data entry, image processing, content filtering, and content creation. You assign and work on tasks through Facebook.

June Co-Creation Odds and Ends is a post from: co>innovative

Are these folks useful partners in the co-creation process or a motley crowd of passive consumers?

As with everything else there is no clear answer but a spectrum of answers that will work for some companies in some situations and not for others. (Speciation and useless business advice)

Item: A recent contest calling for designs for Smart cars. A nice marketing exercise, but what came out of it? Did Smart gain any true fodder for new designs? Will any of them be made available? Likely not. Customers may feel a bit more affinity to Smart cars after participating, but the number of people interested in designing their own car exterior or paying to have one applied, I would contend, is extremely limited and niche. Perhaps the market is large enough to sustain several niche businesses such as Infectious which crowdsources decals for cars, phones, laptops, skateboards, and other objects. Or Ryz for shoes. Or Cardsink for greeting cards.

Item: 100×100. Daniel Schipper has a design up for a lamp that he would like to produce. He needs 100 preorders before it will be produced. This makes the process efficient for the manufacturer, but for the consumer it requires uncertainty and a lot of patience. Very cool, but, again, very niche.

Item: The king of co-creation, Quirky allows anyone to post an idea for a product for $99 which is then worked on by the crowd to decide whether to move forward with it and how to improve upon it. People who have the most influence on the product receive a certain amount for every item that is sold once a set number of presales are made. I haven’t seen anyone else come close to executing on this concept as well as Quirky has. They filter out a lot of crappy ideas up front due to the $99 posting fee, they provide a good monetary incentive for people to contribute, and have the expertise and industrial design experience to pull it off. My sense is this is a powerful platform but that it will be relegated to niche products and low volumes.

The key is eliciting and using feedback in the right situations and in the right way. After all, you only need a small subset or sampling of customers to provide feedback or help with co-creation to create value for the rest of the passive consumers. And from the other side, you need to understand when NOT to listen to your customers, who can provide great insight into the present but have difficulty with predicting the future.

The Disputed Value of Customer Engagement and Feedback is a post from: co>innovative

The Co-Creation Landscape is a post from: co>innovative

There are a ton of great examples of what is going on in this space, so I hope they leave the complete list of nominations up after the competition is completed on April 8th.

Thanks to a previous commenter, Daniel, for pointing me in the direction of IndieGoGo, a crowdfunding platform for filmmakers. I just nominated IndieGoGo along with Kickstarter (which was inexplicably missing from the Open100 list). Looking forward to the results.

Open 100: Finding the top 100 open innovators in the world is a post from: co>innovative

That is one piece of the story: the democratization of access to industrial grade manufacturing at scales available to amateurs and hobbyists (democratized innovation). Part two is extending the actual design of products to customers (mass customization and crowdsourcing). Somewhat along the lines of the Open Source Car project, which I wrote about previously, Local Motors sought to solicit ideas and designs from members (of which they have 5,000). They are producing a pretty wicked looking car designed by contributor Sangho Kim that will be built in distributed building centers. Similar to the ubiquitous Threadless, which inspired Local Motors to some extent, users submit designs and it is voted up until a car reaches a certain popularity after which it will be produced in limited runs. This fills in the market with specialized, small run cars and meet needs that would not be possible with the large auto firms.

Local Motor's first car

“Thus the new industrial organizational model. It’s built around small pieces, loosely joined. Companies are small, virtual, and informal. Most participants are not employees. They form and re-form on the fly, driven by ability and need rather than affiliation and obligation. It doesn’t matter who the best people work for; if the project is interesting enough, the best people will find it.”

Each step of conceiving, designing, prototyping, manufacturing, and selling are within reach of just about anyone with a surprisingly small amount of capital. Couple that with bringing in the crowd at any point to help fund or vet ideas and the current situation becomes that much more interesting.

The Next Industrial Revolution is a post from: co>innovative

If you want to design a product and have it built you currently have three options — short of contracting with a manufacturer which is complex and expensive.

Slap a graphic design on a commodity product: You might be familiar with Zazzle and Cafepress which allow anyone to upload a design and sell physical products, but these services are limited in that you are stuck simply printing a graphic design on a preselected commodity product which is then shipped from a central location.
Design an object from flat materials that are laser cut. Ponoko is the best example of this. You can choose from a whole host of materials. Designers post designs, Ponoko handles the sale, cuts the material, and either sends it to the seller or directly to the buyer. (Can I interest you in some biohazard coasters, perhaps?)
Design an object in 3D and have it “printed”. Shapeways takes 3D models and creates physical objects from them. (Or would you prefer a small skeleton sculpture?)

Each of these services have been available in the past to people and companies with significant resources, but never before have they all been available and affordable for normal folk. And now, ShopBot and Ponoko have partnered to create 100KGarages. Ponoko is supplying it’s online “click to make” system and ShopBot, which makes CNC routers, brings the distributed digital fabricators who are in 54 countries around the world. Products designed anywhere, printed wherever you are, in runs as small as 1 unit.

This allows for designers and builders to essentially sell a product before it exists! Instead of design->prototype->test->manufacture->market->retail->Sale, the process can look like this: design->market->Sale->manufacture.

The great innovation here is not only the atomization of the process (you can design a product and put it out in the world to see if someone else wants to build it or you can just build other people’s designs) but at the same time the loose coupling of the process (if you want you can take it from start to finish using several services that are tied together). The basic infrastructure is there.

For now it will be relegated largely to hobbyists and, no, it can be expensive (3D printing in particular), but I would imagine within a few years we may see a successful product that comes about through this loosely coupled chain of services… a design student in India uses a free online design tool… a retail site such as Ponoko hosts the design… a buyer in the NY purchases… a 3D printer NY that has the correct materials prints the object and ships it to the buyer.

UPDATE: A few weeks after 100KGarages launched, a similar idea was introduced through CloudFab.com, “a central marketplace to connect buyers and sellers” of 3D printed parts and objects. So, for now, think of this as very similar to 100KGarages, with the main point of differentiation being that CloudFab is focused on 3D printing, and 100K Garages is focused on 2D materials. More info at MadeForOne

Distributed design and manufacturing is here; or How I correctly predicted the future… is a post from: co>innovative

Many people mistakenly think that open source projects are emergent, self-organized and democratic. The truth is just the opposite: most are run by a benevolent dictator or two. What makes successful open source projects is leadership, plain and simple. One or two people articulate a vision, start building towards it and bring others on board with specific tasks and permissions.

Remember this concept if you ever decide to run a crowdsourcing, idea generation, or co-creation system with your customers — or anyone, for that matter. Simply making the tools available will do not good. Nor will a vague sense of who is in charge. Central leadership is still necessary. Enterprises shouldn’t believe that putting a project out in the wild without definitive leadership and support will produce anything of value. Everything needs a champion to drive it forward.

Simple enough, but the real value I see created in what I write about here has sprung out of a – sometimes hypothetical – balancing and blending of external inputs or votes or intellectual property or funding or designs with a strong plan, leadership, and vision. That includes rejecting bad ideas. Saying NO to your customers when you feel strongly about it (37 Signals’ favorite past-time.). Retaining focus on what is important and getting rid of the extraneous.

Essentially: co-creation doesn’t take the work out of what you do but it can enhance it and help you more deeply understand the people you serve.

Open source succeeds under a benevolent dictatorship — and so do co-creation projects is a post from: co>innovative