A week ago, InnoCentive announced the aquisition of OmniCompete, another innovation-contest platform. To my knowledge, it’s the first acquisition of one contest-platform by another (correct me if I’m wrong). In the blog post that announced this strategic move, InnoCentive’s and OmniCompete’s CEOs explain the rationale for this merger, but I think that this type of operation also implies interesting challenges concerning platform- and community-management. Continue reading →
Iconic brands and designs… are being reinvented by creative crowds
Do you recognize the above brands and products? Probably you’ve recognized the Lacoste Crocodile and the Swiss Knives, maybe even the colors of n°4711 Eau de Cologne… iconic brands and/or products that with worldwide recognition. The book Mythologies described this type of symbols of the consumption era back in 1957, there has even been an updated version about current myths like the GPS, the iPod or Nespresso. This post is not about books, though, but about a couple of creative crowdsourcing initiatives that asked creatives to reinvent old classics, namely the Renault 4 and Fiat 500 (on Designboom), 4711 Eau de Cologne (on Ideanet), Lacoste and Tag Heuer (on eYeka), the Swiss Army Knife (on Jovoto) and Nokia’s Ringtone (on Audiodraft). Take a tour. Continue reading →
Do you know of publications about academics’ motivations to conduct research? Write an answer on Quora:
Do you know of publications about academics’ motivations to conduct research?
This week I’ve dowloaded Cyclepedia, an iPad application about iconic bicycle designs. I wouldn’t have expected to be so pleasantly surprised by an application like that: it’s well-designed, interactive, beautiful and highly interesting! I’ve discovered folding bikes, asymetrical bikes, tiny bikes, and even allroad-bikes (not offroad, allroad!)… and everything is presented in a fantastic navigation. Get it (really)!
The screen is the applications navigation by bike weight. Look at the top of the image, these are the other possible navigation settings. Simply awesome!
Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth Of Networks
Wow, it’s already the 8th part of this series about brands and their web-based participatory efforts. Companies like Danone, Heineken, Coca-Cola, Siemens, Unilever, GE and Dell do leverage web 2.0 to innovate and engage consumers, this part is dedicated to Nokia. The Finnish cellphone manufacturer seriously missed the co-creative push ushered by Apple and its applications, so they had to catch up and innovate their own way out of this crisis. Here are some of their initiatives, and they’re still learning.
Right after writing that blog post about crowdsourcing at Dell, I read an interesting piece of research about participation in the Dell Ideastorm crowdsourcing-platform. The paper is authored by Barry L. Bayus an d will be published in Management Science in the next months (see the first version, and the second version – by the way, it’s a great way to see how mauch a paper evolves durring the reviewing process). While it has not been published yet, the findings are interesting to look at, because they’re among the first ones to analyze participation in crowdsourcing over time. And it seems that there are challenges ahead for Dell… Continue reading →
Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth Of Networks
Another part of our series about brands and companies which leverage various web-platforms to co-create with consumers or other crowds. This week, it’s certainly (with Starbucks) one of the most notorious cases of co-creation: Dell Computers. The Wikipedia page of “co-creation” currently cites Dell by saying that ” Customer-facing functions such as sales or customer service were also opened up to co-creation at companies including Starbucks and Dell Computer“. But beyond co-creation, Dell is increasingly leveraging the internet to crowdsource marketing and innovation tasks. Here’s more…
