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).

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A new sub-category as well as three best practice examples have been added to the list of open innovation and crowdsourcing examples. The following three projects were added to the new open source sub-category (under Corporate Initiatives):

1. LEGO Mindstorms - open source robots
2. BurdaStyle - open source sewing
3. GoldCorp - the famous GoldCorp Challenge

Note: It concerns open source initiatives/experiments from established companies, not peer produced open source projects like Open Source Software for example.

The central question is: how can existing companies tap into the creativity and wisdom of the crowd in order to improve the usability, design, and desirability of their products? Contrary to conventional business thinking, the cases of LEGO, BurdaStyle and GoldCorp provide successful examples of how publicly sharing confidential information opens up new opportunities, and in the end, has a positive bottom-line impact on profitability. Have a close look at these 3 examples, and embrace a new way of thinking about sharing information and enabling your customers to participate in your NPD (New Product Development) processes.

Our users have a lot to tell us. This is nothing new. User research, needfinding, and ethnography are all rooted in the idea that users can tell us a lot about how to design more effective products and services. Why? Users get us (designers) outside of our own viewpoints, they help us see the world from their point of view and they help us to develop empathy which we can then use to develop more effective products. Users have a lot to tell us. We should be listening.

And for the most part, we are. Most design firms have incorporated some sort of user research into their processes. I see some intersections of this sort of user-centered design with the growing movement of crowd sourcing. For clarity’s sake, I’m thinking of crowdsourcing as an open source model applied to products and services. The nature of a product is shifting from a static thing to one which can be manipulated, hacked and altered by users.

As users participate more in the creation of their products and services designers will face considerable challenges, but we’ll also have the opportunity to get a deeper understanding of our users. Read the rest of this post >