Quirky
From P2P Foundation
= Crowdsourcing & Co-Creation platform for Open Innovation
URL = http://mass-customization.blogs.com/mass_customization_open_i/2010/10/http;//www.Quirky.com
Business Model
Frank Piller:
"* Providing me with a great new example of the "collective customer commitment" method we described in our 2006 pape. At Quirky, new products are only produced if a minimum amount of customers show support (commitment to purchase) the product.
- Providing a platform for products originating from deep user insights and offering anyone the platform of turning great ideas into real products -- and profiting from it (see below). Also, if your idea does not make it to a final stage, you get a great feedback report with the consolidated community feedback and research on the idea.
- Demonstrating a great model of "hybrid" value creation between openness and closeness. Most activities are performed by the community and are freely revealed on the platform, but Quirky provides (hierarchical) coordination and takes over the more complicated developing steps, like finalizing the design and the technical development of the product.
- Being one of the first companies that really(!) takes external contributors serious. Ben Kaufmann told us at MIT that the core challenge when launching the company has been to develop an algorithm that provides a fair distribution of 30% of all revenues' to the community members who contributed to a particular project. In average, 1200-1500 contributors are paid per product! Such a large-scale contribution scheme still is very rare in for-profit industries -- but should become a role model for the co-creation economy."
More Information
- NYT article by Rob Walker at http://www.murketing.com/journal/?p=3962
