The Rise of the Creative Consumer

[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.