A report in issue 264 (January 2008) of UK computer magazine PC Plus details Intel’s current research in various fields (no online version of this article unfortunately).  While many of the areas covered relate to processors, and as such are outside the scope of this website, one project is very interesting from the point of […]

Custom furniture maker Context Furniture has launched a new website called Design Democracy ’08 – Power to the People, which they describe as a grass roots event aimed at raiseing awareness about mass customization.
This website offers curriculum for DD08 ‘citizens’ (members) to learn about mass customization processes, philosophies, materials, design elements and software/hardware applications.  Most […]

Wikinomics, or to use its full title “Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” is a chronicle of how traditional collaboration - in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention centre - has been superceeded by collaborations on an astronomical scale.

The book opens by telling the story of Goldcorp Inc., a mining company […]

A recent post on this site profiled FellowForce, an open innovation project that acts as an intermediary between enterprises and individual innovators. At the time I had noted that the FellowForce website had certain limitations which limited the prospects for success. However, since then FellowForce has made an innovation of its own that […]

Springwise recently reported on developments involving the new trend of crowdsourced band management, which can also be referred to as ‘crowdfinancing’ as the participants pay a fee for the privilege of being involved in deciding the direction of a band. The first entrant in this new marketplace, Sellaband, recently celebrated its first anniversary. […]

The Economist, a weekly UK magazine that is one of the most influential business publications in the World, recently undertook a project which it described as crowdsourcing but is probably closer in nature to open innovation. The magazine asked its readership what new directions it should take in leveraging its intellectual capital and resources. They […]

CreateSpace, part of the Amazon.com, has recently announced a new online Books on Demand service.
CreateSpace was originally founded as CustomFlix Labs, Inc. in 2002 and acquired by Amazon.com Inc. in 2005. Prior to launching the Books on Demand service, CreateSpace was already providing inventory-free, physical distribution of CDs and DVDs on Demand, and video […]

The Openeur website, which focuses on open innovation and entrepreneurship, has published a very comprehensive list of projects that use a crowdsourcing methodology, and also related agencies and platforms.  The post adopts a new label for the projects that use crowdsourcing to raise finance for things like managing rock bands or football clubs.  They call […]

Mikko Ahonen, who runs the Beyond Creativity blog on open innovation, creativity and technology, has posted an interesting evaluation, of Fellowforce, a service that acts as an intermediary between companies and individual innovators or problem solvers.
Fellowforce is a collaboration between Building Better Business, a Dutch organisation that promotes entrepreneurship and a related business […]

In recent months, technology magazine Wired in collaboration with NewAssignment.Net has embarked on unique project - to launch a reporting project that would focus on a particular trend or area of interest, and then open up its reporting process to outsiders, who would work with the Wired editorial staff to carry out interviews with key […]

An interesting idea recently covered by Springwise is custom blended teas. Blends For Friends is a British company that sells custom-blended teas, mainly ordered as gifts. The buyer is asked to provide some information about the chosen recipient, although only some basic details are obligatory. However, there are many more optional pieces of information […]

Zazzle, the online marketplace for personalized products, may be close to securing funding of $30M from a hedge fund investor. This was reported on Friday last on Techcrunch.
No official statement has, as yet, been issued by Zazzle regarding any investment.  If true, it would continue a remarkable run of success for Zazzle in attracting […]

The Wealth of Networks is Yochai Benkler’s heavyweight analysis of the state of the internet in the early part of the 21st Century. In the book, Benkler argues strongly in favour of what he calls ’social production’, which harnesses impulses, time and resources that, in the industrial information economy, would have been wasted or […]

Via the P2P Foundation blog, I recently read an article entitled The Tranformation of Manufacturing in the 21st Century, written by Lawerence J. Rhoades of Ex One, a developer and supplier of innovative manufacturing technology and equipment in Pennsylvania, USA.
It is an excellent and comprehensive article detailing the nature of desktop manufacturing and how it […]

Erick Schonfeld, editor-at-large of Business 2.0 magazine and presenter of The New Disruptors on CNNMoney , recently visited a startup called Desktop Factory. This company is involved in developing 3D printing hardware, and aims to bring their product within financial reach of home users within a few years.
The most interesting aspect of Desktop Factory’s […]