How users created a new sport by Innovating on the "fly".
In 1978 Jürgen Honscheid came over from West Germany for the first Hawaiian World Cup and discovered jumping, which was new to him, although Mike Horgan and I were jumping in 1974 and 1975. There was a new enthusiasm for jumping and we were all trying to outdo each other by jumping higher and higher. The problem was that . . . the riders flew off in mid-air because there was no way to keep the board with you—and as a result you hurt your feet, your legs, and the board.
Then I remembered the “Chip,” a small experimental board we had built with footstraps, and thought “it’s dumb not to use this for jumping.” That’s when I first started jumping with footstraps and discovering controlled flight. I could go so much faster than I ever thought and when you hit a wave it was like a motorcycle rider hitting a ramp; you just flew into the air. All of a sudden not only could you fly into the air, but you could land the thing, and not only that, but you could change direction in the air!
The whole sport of high-performance windsurfing really started from that. As soon as I did it, there were about ten of us who sailed all the time together and within one or two days there were various boards out there that had footstraps of various kinds on them, and we were all going fast and jumping waves and stuff. It just kind of snowballed from there. (Shah 2000). By 1998, more than a million people were engaged in windsurfing, and a large fraction of the boards sold incorporated the user-developed innovations for the high-performance sport.
Users are great Innovators.
A growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many and perhaps most new industrial and consumer products. Further, the contribution of users is growing steadily larger as a result of continuing advances in computer and communications capabilities.
Some facts that prove this:
• Annual sales of lead user product ideas generated by the average lead user project at 3M were conservatively forecast by management to be more than 8 times the sales forecast for new products developed in the traditional manner—$146 million versus $18 million per year.
• Empirical studies show that many users—from 10% to nearly 40%—engage in developing or modifying products.
• Studies have shown that these individuals are often strongly motivated to innovate by the joy and learning they get from this activity.
Well enough data....Democrathings.com is an online feedback and Research platform for product/industrial designers and DIY micro-factories created by two young entrepreneurs: one an industrial designer himself and the other one, the idea guy. You can listen to users' ideas, do research at low cost and get instant feedback in real time via online video streaming & interactive surveys while creating your own products in your screen. So once you have a design for a possible product you can:
• post the product online (public or private if you want)
• select demographics of possible users
• get instant feedback while talking to them live (love it, hate it...let them talk)
• get reports (numbers/charts so you can make better financial decisions)
• pay your participants...obviously at a fraction of the cost of traditional research.
Then what?...Well go ahead make those products and rock their world.
Democrathings is opening just 100 invitations for Designers of their web service...as of right
now (2/25/10) 50 have been awarded. Would you like to tap into users' ideas and make the
Story and facts: By Eric Von Hippel. Democratizing Innovation 2007.
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