Participatory Consumption
The March 10 edition of “The Economist” talked about the “rise of the creative consumer”, the idea that customers are an under-used source for ideas about product innovation. “… in the past firms have mostly resisted customer innovation or not known what to do with it. American farmers were lobbying manufacturers to make cars with detachable back seats as early as 1909. It took Detroit more than a decade to “invent” the pick-up truck. Even now, carmakers respond to customer modifications such as performance-exhaust systems by voiding the warranty.”
This practice of customer-driven innovation is widely used within the commercial software development industry. Customers drive product innovation because most software companies have few (if any) people who are expert in the domain where the software product will be used. Computing is a “meta” technology. That is, small-business accounting packages and shuttle-launch applications share a similar set of concepts and components. Therefore, in most cases, technical people within the software industry are more valued for their competence within the software development realm the their knowledge of the realm where the software will be used. Software companies depend on their customers to tell them what needs to be enhanced, because they themselves don’t know the domain.
When manufacturers of physical products (as opposed to software products) start opening their R&D process to customer-driven innovation, they are not always prepared for the response. “Within three weeks of launching “Mindstorms”, a build-it-yourself robot development system, in 1997, Lego was facing around 1,000 hackers who had downloaded its operating system, vastly improved it, and posted their work freely online. After a long stunned silence, Lego appears to have accepted the merits of this community’s work: programs written in hacker language may now be uploaded to the Mindstorms website, for example.”
One almost feels sorry for Lego (after one stops admiring their serendipitous luck): they ran smack into the open-source software development version of the customer-driven innovation model, where the customer not only knows what features he wants, he can also implement those features by himself. (http://mindstorms.lego.com)
If only it were this simple with physical products. A few years ago, some manufacturers were experimenting with on-spec-on-demand production. Levi’s “Original Spin” program, for example, allowed customers to specify the design of their jeans, which would then be build according to their specs. (According to the Levi’s web site, “Levi’s® Original Spin® has been temporarily discontinued”.)
How would the intellectual space around consumption change if consumers were involved the development of physical products?