Idea Competitions - Inside or Outside

Interview of Dr. Frank Piller (a chair professor of management at the Technology & Innovation Management Group of RWTH Aachen University, Germany,  one of Europe’s leading institutes of technology, and also a founding faculty  member of the MIT Smart Customization Group at the Massachusetts Institute of  Technology, USA.) by your host, Dan Keldsen of BizTechTalk.com on the topic of Idea Competitions. You may have heard of this topic in the innovation realm, under such names as Crowdsourcing, Crowdcasting, Idea Challenges, Open Innovation, Prediction Markets, and the like - but what is it?

Threadless, Adidas, Converse, Toyota, how are companies tapping both their customers and employees as engines of innovation for everything from naming new products, suggesting tweaks to existing products, or in building entirely new products, resulting in multi-million dollar revenue streams? Find out more in this 18 minutes interview, and join the conversation! Are you using such techniques and systems? Think it's bunk? Worried about crowds of idiots? Let us know!

MP3 File

Comments

[Carl]

I like the podcast! I think it's interesting to hear Frank talk about the way Adidas 'customizes'. I think the Adidas approach touches a very important issue in the field of crowdsourcing, which is the extent to which companies hand over control to customers. Why are there companies? What is their role? How does their role change when customers want more control. I think the Adidas example is a compromise between the way companies operate now and the crowdsourcing model.

Please look at my post about this on http://www.crowdsourcingdirectory.com/?p=28

[Dan Keldsen]

Thanks Carl - and I agree, we're nowhere near the endpoint of 'customer participation' and in companies relinquishing control. Interesting times are ahead!