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Eva Missling is the founder and CEO of 12designer GmbH, a young company based in the heart of Europe, Berlin. After more than 8 years in the design industry, she currently uses her experience as founder of an online marketplace where customers with design demands meet the right creatives to get the job done; it doesn’t matter if it is about naming, slogans, logos, websites or multimedia clips. Quick facts about 12designer.com: more than 7400 registered creatives, 1100 accomplished projects, 250.000 € business volume and available in 5 languages - English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

1) Which 3 main trends does 12designer.com tap into?

First the idea of crowdsourcing itself, that remains to be understood in a practical way by many of our main targets, start-ups and SMEs. The delegation of tasks to the crowd is translated concretely, in the case of 12designer, into a platform where customers can obtain creative solutions, such as logos, flyers, websites, multimedia clips, or naming, slogans, and more. Then, our online roots make internet the natural place to deepen the tendency of building relations and achieving results through it. Taking into account that we are a young and small company, too, we also understand our customers as partners. Third, we offer a real enhancement of cost-effectiveness for entrepreneurs, by giving them the ability of having more professional solutions than those given by their nephews or neighbors, for a price that they can pay. It is about bringing new people to a market that virtually didn’t exist before, not only on the side of customers, but also of talented designers that are starting their professional careers.

2) What is your unique selling point in the market (compared to 99designs, crowdSPRING, etc.)?

Compared to our main competitors, I can mention some advantages. For instance, we offer more than just design projects. Start-ups looking for a name can do an online XXL brainstorm session with us, in order to find the right one. Sound and multimedia creations are also possible: radio spots, computer games effects, screencasts and webvideos, all that can be done on our platform! We support 4 more languages besides English: German, Italian, French and Spanish. It means that, despite a geographically united world under the internet, we are able to reach out groups with different cultural backgrounds, and, as a major European crowdsource marketplace, we do understand European client needs better. Finally, and most important, we keep a close contact to them and our creative community, what has ensured a level of satisfaction that we want to keep in the next stages of our development. If there is someone out there not satisfied, I’ll be happy to be in touch and talk about any shortcomings that may have happened.

3) Which challenges have proven most successful? Why?

The most successful? I would say the launch of 12designer itself. We had a demand much higher than we thought just in the beginning of everything, when we planned to maintain for a while a German version only. We realized, though, that it would be our chance to develop further and launch a Spanish and English version for the website, which happened only two months after. With that, we would give a worldwide channel to our platform and also tap into the market of my sponsor Grupo Intercom, Spain. We became market leaders there in a matter of a couple of months.

4) What is your revenue model? Do you plan for other revenue streams?

We have recently introduced a Freemium model, after a completely free period gave the platform credibility. It has been a success so far. Right now, we have the free 12basic option, that limits the number of participants of a project to 12, and 12plus, paid, with unlimited participation and advanced options such as privacy. A 12premium project option is also on the way. As this will keep us busy for the next months, we don’t plan to have another revenue stream in the near future.

Try it for free: To strenghten their positioning as start-ups’ partner, 12designer is going to offer on the 15th of July the possibility for everyone  to create projects with advanced features for FREE. No fees will be charged. An excellent opportunity to try it out!

What are the main trends in innovation? Mark Turrell, CEO of Imaginatik, shares his 10 predictions.

1. Innovation involves more than just R&D (seriously!) – Companies like Wrigley may have pioneered this, but it is clear that the best companies realized a while ago that R&D is only one aspect of innovation, not the be all and end all, and often not even the driving force. Growth often comes from innovation in new channels, new packaging, business models and so on – and it makes no sense to treat innovation as a single-function business activity, hidden away with the scientists in R&D.

2. Not enough invented here so look outside – We may still have cultural challenges to overcome in looking outside company walls to bring in new inventions and methods, but companies really don’t have a choice anymore. The pace of change is too rapid – and no firm can hire all the best people. Open Innovation is here to stay.

3. Experiment with Collective Intelligence and crowdsourcing – Expect to see an ever-increasing number of firms applying crowdsourcing internally and externally to address a variety of problems, from new product development to sustainability. The path has been set for expansion!

4. Ideas are precious so manage them – With Gartner predicting that Idea Management will be mainstream in two years, it is time for companies to effectively manage ideas and idea generation rather than relying on heaps of Post-Its and random spreadsheets. The methods and tools exist to do it properly, so companies in 2010 will really up their game in this area.

5. Innovate the Innovation Process (and do it properly for a change) – All companies innovate in some way. Some do it way better than others. Top firms have been experimenting for 10 years with online consumer insights, new means of doing rapid prototypes, and new physical environments to trial and test innovations in realistic scenarios. There are still too many firms jumping on to simplistic, fancy sounding innovation bandwagons, without thinking through the implications. So we’re expecting more companies to change the way they are innovating, and to spend more time putting in place proper systems to do so.

6. Innovation with full-time staff… – It is remarkable how many firms do NOT have full-time staff working on innovation. Firms have 50-person six sigma teams, and 25% of a person’s time to drive innovation. That does not make any sense – and has been proven not to work over the last five years. Companies therefore are moving people into innovation full-time; more and more are doing so to manage the process of innovating.

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A tongue-in-cheek history of our favorite paradigm
This new series offers a not-so-serious history lesson about the difficult birth of open innovation and its little brother crowdsourcing. It is a long story to tell, so we have divided it into five little parts: From the golden age of closed innovation, cash-carrying guinea pigs, Mr. Chesbrough’s famous thoughts, users to the lead all the way to open innovation to the fullest.
As we hope that you enjoy the ride we also suggest that you look out of the window once in a while to find out how far along the road your company has come.

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My company is my castle

Castles of Closed Innovation

Everyone knows that all companies around the world follow the same old tradition: we build, you buy. All companies, you might ask?
Well, dear reader, follow us back in the mists of the dark 20th century, when it was safe to say that in fact almost all companies in manufacturing came up with their own nifty ideas, transformed them in to terrific products in their own R&D facilities, produced them in their own steaming factories and finally released their products into the wild rivers of the distribution channels. To keep brief: A company was a castle, and it shall be protected with mighty walls built of occult company secrets and frightening patents.

Xerox the Great and other tales
During the rule of the merciless not-invented-here syndrome, companies sought protection from mysterious foreign technologies that would regularly jam their precious printers, mess up their sleek assembly lines and cheat in the beloved KANBAN card trading game.
Just listen to the story Mr. Chesbrough likes to tell: It was back in the days of the golden age, when Xerox the Great was not content producing its own toner, its own copy-machines and its own light bulbs. No, something just didn’t feel right with this odd paper the kingdom had been buying from some silly strangers. Thus, it was decided that it was best to make, not buy, and henceforth only Xerox paper was to be used within the extensive realms of Xerox.

No one dared to question the superiority of proprietary standards or the fact that companies always knew best what their customers want. It was not until the raging battle of the format war was over, while Sony was busy licking its wounds that a few bards would sing of the grave importance of investigating customer needs before going to war with a new product.

As you might have already expected, these days were as golden as they were numbered: the information age began to besiege the corporate fortresses, and as the reinforced masonries fell one by one, the logic of the closed innovation became as outdated as the infamous mullet. Next up, follow the road to the infamous customer labs…