They’re coming at a faster rate now.
This month’s Fast Company (page 66) features six companies using “open innovation” practices to create more customized products that better meet customer needs.
As this blog has posted often, content co-creation has various forms from volunteer based (peer production) to user-paid based (such as crowdsourcing and crowdfunding) product creation processes.
The best example in the FC story for me is from Slim Devices. Wouldn’t you want to have a community of 12,000 customers help you design and produce a product that they will pay to own eventually? Envious? Read on.
Squeezebox (above) was developed through user suggestions as well as actual volunteer programmer assistance on its interface, OS, and add-ons. The community is currently developing an application called Jive that let’s the user view and control music on their computers with anything from a TV to a smartphone.
The average user is not a software expert but a mere audiophile.
12,000 users for a single product…. so -
What’s your association’s excuse for not being able to create and sustain online community when you should have an easier time doing so?
Why are companies more trusting of their customers to co-create content on a massively distributed scale than associations who have a supposedly closer and richer relationship with its members?
Because many of you don’t trust your own rank and file members to create quality content.
Fess up. You know who you are.
Hiding behind old, closed-ended peer-review methods that only lock you into a few experts and lock you out of the experience and expertise of a wider, more creative audience.
To learn more about content co-creation as a strategy, case studies, ways to set them up, and methods to choose from, etc. – click on the “Product Co-Creation” category index of previous posts.
It’s your future. What are you going to do?
Oh and somebody send a Squeezebox to Douglas Rushkoff please.
