[via Kottke] One of my favourite reads, The Economist, has an article — The Rise of the Creative Consumer — with ideas that I plan to use in my own role as the Tucows Developer Relations Guy…
LAST November, engineers in the healthcare division of General Electric (GE) unveiled something called the “LightSpeed VCT”,
a scanner that can create a startlingly good three-dimensional image of
a beating heart. This spring Staples, an American office-supplies
retailer, will stock its shelves with a gadget called a “wordlock”, a
padlock that uses words instead of numbers. In Munich, meanwhile,
engineers at BMW have begun prototyping
telematics (combining computing and telecoms) and online services for a
new generation of luxury cars. The connection? In each case, the firm’s
customers have played a big part (GE, BMW) or the leading role (Staples) in designing the product.
How does innovation happen? The familiar story involves boffins in academic institutes and R&D labs.
But lately, corporate practice has begun to challenge this
old-fashioned notion. Open-source software development is already
well-known. Less so is the fact that Bell, an American bicycle-helmet
maker, has collected hundreds of ideas for new products from its
customers, and is putting several of them into production. Or that
Electronic Arts (EA), a maker of computer games,
ships programming tools to its customers, posts their modifications
online and works their creations into new games. And so on. Not only is
the customer king: now he is market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager, too.