Why
You Should Let a 5-Year Old Design Your Next Product
By Nilofer Merchant on May 23, 2013 11:50 am
All his life, he hated brushing his teeth. Getting
toothpaste onto a toothbrush can be messy if your fine motor skills
are still developing. And, of course, even though you know you’re
supposed to replace a toothbrush every three months, who really keeps
track of that? So, Houston Diaz decided to invent a solution. And several
prototypes later, he designed a toothbrush that has the toothpaste
dispenser integrated into the brush itself, allowing himself and
others to have a more convenient solution. And when the toothpaste
runs out? It’s a natural reminder that it’s time to buy a new brush.
Even though he’s only five years old, that product will
one day be on the shelves of your local Bed Bath and Beyond, or
Target. And, no, as precocious as this kid is, he is not an
entrepreneur, and doesn’t need to raise VC money or write a business
plan.
This five-year old is able to be the inventor without
also creating a company because of a product innovation company
called Quirky.
What Quirky does is make invention accessible to anybody — and quite
possibly everybody. In the Industrial Era, becoming an “inventor”
meant you also had to create an organization that could produce,
market, and sell your invention. Thus, it’s been a hard gig to crack.
You not only had to be able to come up with great winning ideas, you
also had to deal with the complexities of financing, engineering, distribution,
recruiting staff, and legal liability — to name just a few. The
intensity of the organizational demands narrowed the chances that new
solutions would ever actually come to market. And, of course, this
slowed innovation and restrained market outcomes.
Quirky has created an innovation engine more suited for the Social Era — in which work and
jobs are no longer the same thing, and collaboration happens outside
of organizations as much as within it — in three ways:
- It disaggregates the
process of innovation from the innovator’s work itself.
- It aligns interests
and economics so that all parties have a shared interest.
- It engages community
to improve ideas and ultimately co-create the value.
To date, Quirky has allowed 590 inventors to bring their
products to market. Anyone can submit an idea, or you can help
another idea be improved, or you can collaborate in further design
refinement. Over 407,000 community members (growing at a rate of
about 1,000 members a day) help create the solution in a variety of
ways (from voting on best ideas to iterating or actually prototyping
the concept). Organizationally, this means that with 140 people on
payroll, less than 1% of the people involved are “inside” the
organization in the traditional sense. This is scale in the social
era: scale happens not by having more people report to you, but by
having people engaged with you. Interests are 100% aligned. Both the
inventor and the larger community get compensated for their work.
By working with an extended community, Quirky can bring
at least three new consumer products to market each week. And by
“market” we mean 188 retail partners. Ben
Kaufman, the founder and CEO, says there is no limit to
what they can create. “Even cars?” I asked him, curious about how far
his vision holds. “Yeah, sure,” he replied. Ben himself is 26 and has
been on the Tonight Show to tell the
Quirky story. Thus far, Quirky has brought nearly 500 products to
market, since 2009 and the level of sophistication and quality
continues to grow.
Back to Houston Diaz’s toothbrush. He started this
project with help from his dad. When he was done, he uploaded video
and watched as votes started to roll in for his “no mess toothbrush.
He agitated for more support himself, even calling his dentist and
asked his vote. “No one was exempt from his pitch,” says Houston’s
mom, Nancy
Lublin. (As CEO of Dosomething.org, she’s clearly raising
someone who believes in action.) Then Quirky put it “under
consideration” — a live debate takes place for vetting ideas, which
entrepreneurs are encouraged to attend. Houston and his dad wore
matching jackets and ties, and Houston made sure his mohawk was extra
spiky. He listened as people debated his idea, and answered questions
as they came up. And very shortly (in the next 3-4 weeks), they will
put the product into production.
Now you may not want to be an inventor. And maybe your
kid doesn’t want to either. But the Quirky business model embodies a
set of ideas that every business ought to be considering, in light of
the Social Era. Quirky builds on a fundamental truth of the social
era: Ideas can come from anywhere, from anyone without first being
vetted to see if that person is “allowed” to have that idea. And as
we find our way into the Social Era, we’re going to grapple with what
it means to be a leader like Ben Kauffman — more like a community
organizer than a traditional head honcho. Show me a leader, goes the
saying, and I’ll show you a bunch of followers. The challenges of our
era don’t require more followers; they require the kind of leadership
that encourages the community to build what’s needed so that anyone
and quite possibly everyone can exercise initiative.
Today, a few smart people see this as “the future.” Even
smarter ones see it as “the present.” Which one are you?
And, more importantly, what are you doing about it?
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