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 […]

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 […]

Back in November 2006, I speculated as to the type of businesses which might emerge using a hybrid of mass customization, crowdsourcing, micro manufacturing and online factory business models. One such hybrid has emerged recently in New Zealand. Ponoko describes itself as the world’s first personal manufacturing platform where anyone can click to […]

A few developments have taken place in the Nordic countries recently that seem to suggest a more advanced enthusiasm for and understanding of user-centred innovation.
Previously, I wrote about how the Danish government has become the first in the world to establish as a national priority, in the words of a government policy statement, “strengthening user-centered […]

Here are a couple of quick links that may be of use to students or others researching crowdsourcing:
This article on BNet explains and analyses the idea of Crowdsourcing ;
and this post by Michel Bauwens on the Peer Producers blog explains the difference between Crowdsourcing and Peer Production.

Jeff Howe, who wrote the original Wired Magazine article on crowdsourcing, is going to write a book on the crowdsourcing phenomenon.
The publication date is Spring 2008.  Hopefully I’ll have got through my current backlog of reading by then.

Business and innovation website Springwise has compiled ‘Top 10 Business Ideas in 2006′ under various categories. These lists are an interesting review of the best and most innovative business ideas of the year, but some are of particular interest to this website due to their association with mass customization, outside innovation, crowdsourcing and so […]

As the worlds of television and the Internet converge, writers and television producers are developing new forms of interactive and personalised television. On 27 December, the world’s first ‘ShapeShifted’ romantic comedy was broadcast, as “Accidental Lovers” (page in Finnish language) was shown on Finnish national television station, YLE TV1 (page in Finnish language). […]

As we draw towards the end of 2006, It is reasonable to say that the idea of empowering customers with a higher degree of control over their relationship with business has gained widespread acceptance. This basic idea has been researched in great depth over the last twenty years or so. Various terms and acronyms, such […]