I recently had the opportunity to speak with the Stephen Bailey, the marketing and communications director at Fluevog Shoes about their open source footwear project.

How did the idea for the open source footwear initiative come about? When did it start and what was the inspiration?
For years, when john visited other stores and was on the floor, or even out for dinner people would give him their drawing of their perfect shoe. John lost many of these - so the web was an ideal place to collect them, but also showcase them. It started 6 years ago.

I noticed you mentioned “this ain’t no contest - this is open source footwear.” I’m curious, how you distinguish between the two?
People aren’t competing against each other for a prize - sometimes, nothing quite works for us (but of course may later which is why we keep it all up). Truth is, it’s not the perfect use of the term open source either - but we did get the blessing of the godfather of the real open source which you can find on our site.

It may later? What do you mean?
Yeah, sometimes a shoe is submitted and although it might not work for us at the time, a few years later it fits into one of our lines.

Do you publish all the submissions? If so, why? (I have my hunches, but I’m curious).
Truth is, we turn away very few - we have no request for age, so if a 4 year old submits a drawing, we want it up there. Plus, we are an inconclusive fluevocracy of inclusion. We are the brand owned by fluevogers - if you’re a fluevoger and post a picture - up it goes - it would be unfair otherwise).

Read the rest of this post >

Interested in Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing? Subscribe to RSS!

This last weekend, at the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver, I had the pleasure of spending a few minutes talking about collaboration and crowdsourcing with the great folks at GiveMeaning. I had a similar discussion with Jaison Morgan, of the X-Prize Foundation, in Santa Monica last fall. But sadly, these sorts of meetings seem to be few and far between.

By my last count, there are a few dozen web portals dedicated to crowd-sourcing, on the spectrum from ideation, through charity and into straight-up commerce and procurement. I should know - I run one of them. And yet, in a field defined by cooperation over competition, and the wisdom of the crowd over the supremacy of the individual, there is a noticeable glaring lack of communication between these companies.

Why? Here are the reasons I see: Read the rest of this post >

While there is a lot of buzz about crowdsourcing, there is mainly a great lack of insightful tools to give the concept a meaning and place within existing organizations. As a result, not many companies know what crowdsourcing actually is, let alone they are able to integrate it in their businesses. The IOC-model^TM is a very simple tool that shows how and when crowdsourcing can be relevant by integrating it in your decision-making processes.

In traditional business thinking, there are two viable generic options for performing a certain activity: either you do it In-house, either you Outsource it to a specific party (with levels of collaboration in between). Coase’s theorem provides basic insights in this choice on the level of transaction costs. With the rise of the internet however, transaction costs are lowered furthermore, resulting in a new, third option: Crowdsourcing. In this third option, the task is formulated as an open call towards an undefined, generally large group of people. As such, the IOC-model^TM looks at leveraging the wisdom and skills of the crowd, not necessarily only your customers. Crowdsourcing is bottom-line a new generic option to perform activities/tasks/functions, and should be integrated that way in business decision-making.

How to use this tool? Print-out the figure above, and try to apply it systematically when thinking about activities. For example the design of a new logo: should we do it in-house, outsource it to a specific design agency, or crowdsource it in the form of a challenge like spreadshirt? The content on a new website: are we going to do it in-house, outsource it to freelancers, or crowdsource it like YouTube does for video content? Below, the model is applied to the case of corporate R&D.

Read the rest of this post >