Contributed by Anand Chhatpar, CEO of BrainReactions, Chief Editor of BrainWaves E-magazine for Innovation and Idea Generation and founder of the Most Creative People network on Facebook.

I had the chance to interview Dominick Martinetti, CEO of Slappa Distribution, a small but rapidly growing company that is making a great name for itself among DJs and music junkies as an innovative product company. Dominick is an inspiring young man, and I have shared in this article, excerpts from our conversation that reveal his thinking and journey into market leadership.

Slappa has been in business for four years now, and it started with an initial product range consisting of CD cases. It was not a particularly “sexy” business to get into. CD cases had been around for 15 years, and the CD business was not growing aggressively any more. DVDs, computer software and video games still used CD cases, but the margins had been declining for most companies in this space. Also, brands before Slappa had commoditized the product — there was no real choice available to the consumers. Most of the people using these disc cases were forced to not have choices… outside of cosmetic colors, no one was building quality and variety into the cases. Therein lay a problem with CD cases from the consumer’s perspective, which Dominick was able to spot.

To conduct his market research and with an Open Innovation mindset, Dominick went to online bulletin boards and chat rooms for audio professionals like Audiophile, Audio Asylum and Audioreview.com. He sought advice on what these target consumers needed from the ultimate CD case.

Read the rest of this post >

Interested in Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing? Subscribe to RSS!

I saw this the other day on Core77 and although I find most of the picture frames pretty goofy, their use of the ZPrinter is very cool. As I watched the YouTube video, I had the same feeling that I did about 15 years ago when I first saw what you could do with Photoshop – that’s magic! I want it.

Granted, the ZPrinter’s price range of $19-50K will surely keep it off most folk’s Christmas list, but that’s what makes a company like Jujups so smart. It’s going to be a while before these are priced to a place where consumers can by them. In the mean time, I think there’s a tremendous market for companies to offer the production services for interested and creative people.

But please, put some thought into the user experience. The Jujup site doesn’t even begin to represent the power of what they have to offer and I’d hate to see them fail for that reason.

I’m pleased to announce that Open Innovators is partnering with the Open innovation Conference 2008. The 2nd edition of this conference will take place in Las Vegas on February 26-27, 2008. Key speakers include:

• Mark Peterson
  Director, External Business Development, Procter & Gamble
• Victor Welch
  Director, Corporate Marketing Initiatives Group, General Electric
• Kathryn T. Bundy
  Vice President, Technical Product Knowledge, Cadbury-Schwepps
• Jeff Bellairs
  Director, External Innovation, General Mills
• Kristopher Lichter
  Director, Corporate Innovation Projects, IBM Corporation

By bringing together executives charged with navigating all stages of the innovation process, the conference will bring a very practical view on how to implement open innovation in your organization. You can request the brochure for more information, or register right away (Early Registration Discount of 10% until December 21, 2007). Anand Chhatpar will be there for us, and report on the conference.