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2.09.06

Customer-driven innovation

Another interesting example for open innovation (Artikel von Ogawa und Piller):

Started in 2000 by designers Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart, Threadless focuses on a hot fashion item, t-shirts with colorful graphics. This is a typical hit-or-miss product. Its success is defined by fast changing trends, peer recognition, and finding the right distribution outlets for specific designs. Despite these challenges, none of the company’s many product variants ever flopped. But Threadless has neither sophisticated market research or forecasting capabilities nor a complicated flexible manufacturing system. Rather, all products sold by Threadless are inspected and approved by user consensus before any larger investment is made into a new product. Only after a sufficient number of customers have expressed their explicit willingness to buy a new design, the garment is produced. If this commitment is missing, a potential design concept is dismissed. But if enough customers pledge to purchase the product, the design will be finalized and go into production. In this way, market research expenditures are turned into early sales. New designs regularly sell out fast, but are reproduced only if a large enough number of additional customers commit to purchase a reprint. Some customers are even integrated deeper in the new product development process. All new designs are submitted entirely by the community, which includes hobbyists, but also professional graphic designers. The company exploits a large pool of talent and ideas to get new designs (much larger than it could afford if the design process would have been internalized). Creators of submissions which are selected by other users get a $1000 reward, and their name is printed on the particular t-shirt’s label. Since Threadless’ opening, over 400 winning designs have been chosen for print from more than 35,000 submissions. The Threadless community is thriving with over 120,000 users signed up to submit, evaluate, score, and purchase new designs.

Additional information can also be found on Pillar’s weblog

The BusinessWeek also features an article on this issue.

Thanks to Stefan for this link.

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