Customer co-design takes many shapes and forms:
- BMW’s Virtual Innovation Agency solicits proposals from engineers, innovators and entrepreneurs on potential innovations of interest to BMW. They received 4,000 ideas in the first week they launched.
- MUJI’s annual AWARD competition asks budding designers to submit product concepts and prototypes for the chance of a cash award and a great addition to their CV. The 2007 competition received 3,422 entries from 47 countries.
- Netflix offered a $1 million prize for anyone that could improve their recommendation algorithm’s success rate by 10%. None of the 20,000 registered teams have cracked it yet, but one entrant achieved 8.43% improvement, enough to win a $50k progress prize.
- Lego Factory launched with a design competition that led to new lego sets on the shelf, and the designers receiving a cut of the sales.
Nokia’s Beta Lab already serves as a an early adopter test bed for applications and services, but now they’ve launched Nokia Pilots, which looks to do the same for their hardware.
They are looking for passionate customers to take an “active role in the development and testing that will help shape Nokia’s next generation of products and services”, getting actively involved in Nokia’s creative process. If you have a Nokia phone, then get your application in now and you could be one of the lucky few to have next-gen technology in your hands well before its on the shelves.
It seems inevitable that there will be day in the near future where every brand employs a combination of mass crowd-sourcing and select customer co-design on its products, converting the energy and imagination of their most passionate customers into continual sources of inspiration and innovation.
Technorati Tags:
customer experience, engagement, innovation, co-design, product
Subscribe to *supercollider for original research and insight goodness
your blog is quite nice!