Quirky.com Takes Open Innovation to a New Level

Open innovation provides a way for companies to reach outside their walls to find new product ideas in more nontraditional spaces. Ben Kaufman, the 23-year-old founder of Quirky.com, has taken open innovation to a new level with a concept called social new product development. At Quirky.com, any John or Jane Doe can submit an idea, have it go through design and product development and see his or her product on store shelves within a matter of days, or in the case of the Powercurl, one of the company's biggest success stories, just 24 hours.

"I loved seeing products that I designed on shelves worldwide or seeing people using my products while walking down the street. I wanted to find a way for lots and lots of people to experience this feeling, and that is part of my inspiration for starting quirky," explains Kaufman, who started out inventing iPod and iPhone accessories for his first company, Mophie, before creating the Quirky.com platform.

Basically the platform allows for collaborative participation and reward. Unlike typical crowdsourcing platforms where only one person is rewarded for a chosen idea, Quirky.com's algorithm weighs thousands of people's influences in any one decision.

Then, it measures the individual influence of all those who participated in the ultimate decision. All of the people who were involved in each decision are rewarded for their percentage of influence in contributing to the final outcome. In fact, featured on each new product's packaging are the names of all the influencers who helped to bring the product to fruition.

Kaufman's philosophy on innovation is that "everybody has a voice and an idea. We want to get ideas out of people's heads and on to the shelves. There are people walking around saying to themselves, 'Wouldn't it be cool if...' We are providing them the platform to make those things happen."

Furthermore, Kaufman believes that the Quirky.com platform provides three crucial elements to a product's success: speed, presence and marketing. "Any good marketing campaign needs a good story," he says, and what better story to market a product than the story behind Quirky.com.

What are the results of this unconventional platform? Quirky.com has developed 23 new products in six months and brought six of those products to market. Some of these products include DigiDudes, the Scratch-n-Scroll and the Beamer.

"For the moment, we are thrilled with our success. We will continue developing our Quirky-branded products," Kaufman says. In 2010, he plans to develop different segments of the brand such as Quirky gadgets, home, clothing and more. Future plans also include pop up stores in major cities in order to have a retail presence for the Quirky brand and products.