Customer-Made Products
Springwise has a post on a company called CrowdSpirit that’s doing “crowd-driven” product development:
How it works: inventors submit ideas for innovative new products and contributors submit problems for inventors to work on. Members vote, define a product’s specifications, and can invest money to finance development. After a first prototype has been created, selected members test and help fine-tune in cooperation with manufacturers. Once the stage of product development has been completed, contributors continue to be involved, for example by acting as a product’s ambassador and promoting it to retailers, or by providing product support, like translating instruction manuals.
Neat. Collective intelligence and decision markets strike again.
The Springwise article speculates, and I agree, that it will be hard to convince people to generate valuable intellectual property for free. Giving contributors a share in profits would be a suitable incentive. Update 4:40pm, Dec 13: Lionel from Crowdspirit explains in the comments that contributors will indeed share in the profits.
It’ll be a powerful day for democracy when this sort of approach manifests itself in politics. Imagine real citizens actually having a direct voice on policy, rather than being forced to filter it through self-interested politicians.
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Lionel said,
December 13, 2006 @ 4:33 pm
Hello, I think that there is a mjor understanding here. Our business model doesn’t specify that people will “generate valuable intellectual property for free”…of course, the revenue generetad by product sales will be equitably share with all the contributors of a product..we’re not crazy ;-)
best regards
Lioneo, CrowdSpirit
Lionel said,
December 13, 2006 @ 4:34 pm
oups…I mean misundertanding of course ;-) typo..
Oshoma Momoh said,
December 13, 2006 @ 4:37 pm
Sounds cool, thanks Lionel for the clarification.
Lionel said,
December 13, 2006 @ 4:40 pm
No worries Oshoma, that’s fine ;-)