Wouldn’t you love to be an inventor who quickly sees his idea become a product and sold through excellent online and offline retailers? Unfortunately, it has been an extremely difficult, expensive and time-consuming endeavor to invent, design, engineer, manufacture, market and sell a new product, only to see it fail in the marketplace.  You need to obtain financing, file for patents, legal support, in additional to designers, engineers, factories, distributors, warehouses, etc. Quirky has changed that.  [NOTE: The author has no financial or other vested interest in Quirky, but believes the company demonstrates the power of crowdsourcing for ideas, design, engineering, marketing and e-commerce.]   It is now possible for anyone to submit a product idea to Quirky.  Over 200,000 global community members–roughly representative of the market at large–vote on the idea and curate it.  Working with expert Quirky design and engineering teams, the inventor and the community develop the product.  Every aspect of product development–from ideation and naming to design, engineering, protyping, manufacturing, marketing and sales–is crowdsourced.  Products are made by the people and for the people.

Of course, not every idea is a good one. Only those that receive support from the community (market) actually make it through the process.  A prototype is not manufactured unless a threshold of users commit to buying it.   This ensures that every product delivered to the market is profitable.  And who makes the money?  Besides Quirky, inventors and key influencers throughout all stages of the process get paid well for their participation.  Depending upon product success, inventors and key influencers can make hundreds of thousands of dollars on the products brought to market.  This is the ultimate in gamification, as community members are highly motivated to achieve the status and earn the money offered for their participation in the process.

Quirky received Time Magazine’s “Innovation of the Year” award in 2009.  Besides selling via it’s own e-commerce site, a large number of retailers now sell their products, including Target, Amazon, Bed Bath & Beyond, Barnes & Noble, Safeway, Ace Hardware, The Container Store, Frontgate, Toys R Us, OfficeMax, ThinkGeek and MicroCenter.

When interviewed by Nancy Pardo, John Jacobsen, Quirky’s director of engineering indicated that Quirky’s process actual goes beyond crowdsourcing.

It is not crowdsourcing. It’s true participation where the community is involved throughout, from the idea itself to every decision that has to be made along the way – and it’s all done in exchange for a lifetime perpetual royalty. Crowdsourcing is about putting a question out to the community and saying I’ll pay you for your idea, but it’s a one-time transactional thing and once that challenge is done I don’t want to know about the community. It’s very different from what Quirky does. Our community members are engaged and consistently come back because they believe in Quirky as a brand and they want it to do well.

This video provides a terrific introduction to Quirky and demonstrates the power of the processes they have created.