A while back, my pahdner in crime, Udo Szabo, dropped on my desk a few chapters of Charles Leadbeaters book-in-progress, ‘We Think: why mass creativity is the next big thing.’
It was a great summary of the strength of bottom-up community-based organizations. From schools in India to Open Source Software to Wikipedia, he analyzes a great many examples of movements that have arisen from hierarchy-less groups with a common purpose. As with many such books, not very revealing, but very inspiring when all the examples are placed side by side and compared.
The matrix organization
For much of my life I have worked in very flat and small organizations. Indeed, even though I have been in corporate life for only six years, until recently I was pretty much insulated from the real Mega-Corporate Matrix (hmm, now that I put it that way, leads to other imagery).
Now, as I try to navigate the Matrix and try to bring change (for example, my project team pretty much tries to ignore organization walls), I realize that the Matrix organization is a recent invention. Could there be an alternative?
Indeed, Leadbeater’s stuff got me thinking that somewhere in his thought process there was an answer.
Think: the Medici’s and the Hanseatic league, not to mention the Roman Empire or the Hun Khanate, were able to exert considerable influence and power across huge geographies, cultures, and economies – all asynchronously, too.
What I’m leading to is that Leadbeater shows that organizations do not have to be hierarchical or authoritarian. I just wasn’t sure if such Open Source mentality could be applied to a product development organization such as ours.
<breathe>
Crowdsourcing product developement
Lo! The great guys from Trendwatchers.com pointed out this company that is doing just that, crowd-creating manufactured products (link below). Sure, there are places like Threadless and La Fraise, but this is much more complicated – consumer electronics.
What do you think? can it succeed? Can it compete?
Link: CROWD CLOUT | Groups of consumers exercising their collective (purchasing) power:
Another initiative to watch: French CrowdSpirit. Currently in beta-mode, the company hopes to go full circle on crowd-innovation: participants not only submit ideas for consumer electronics, but also take part in every stage of the product life cycle, up to purchasing the end result. In the first stage of the project, the focus will be on products with a market price below EUR 150 (USD 190).
How it will work:
Step 1: The community sends ideas, fine tunes them & votes for the best one.
Step 2: The best ideas and their product specifications are jointly defined with CrowdSpirit’s research and manufacturing partners. Community Investors start financing the product development.
Step 3: The first prototype is tested and fine-tuned by the community.
Step 4: Customers purchase products thanks to the CrowdSpirit supply chain. The community takes care of product support and recommends products to retailers.A tentative launch is planned for this summer. May we humbly suggest that every B2C industry, from travel to food & beverage experiment with this model? If only to get a feel for the innovation prowess of ‘ordinary consumers’. But we’re digressing, we’ve hit you over the head with this many times in our CUSTOMER-MADE briefings 😉
Hev you seen his speech on TED talks? Great stuff!