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Quirky.com was launched in 2009 with a mission to make invention accessible to everyone. You could share your ideas with a community of over a million people and get involved in bringing the best ideas to market. They started hundreds of thousands of idea projects through the community, launched hundreds of products and paid over $10m in payments to the Community. BUT, they were working their way through $80m of Venture Capitol funding at a terrific rate

They also launched Partnerships with the likes of GE which also gave them a cash injection of $30m . To me, they were pioneers in Crowd-based innovation Management but when they closed their doors in 2015 it was a huge shame. 

BUT, they’re back. They’ve re-invented themselves

Essentially, Quirky has decided to partner with open-innovation friendly companies that have the capacity to get to market and thrive there – essentially licensing as a business model. 

Quirky will apparently take anywhere from a 5 percent to 10 percent cut when an invention is being sold directly to consumers and the inventor will earn a 3 percent royalty. When a third-party retailer sells the product, the inventor will earn 1.5 percent. This information is clearly stated on the company’s FAQ page.

While 1.5-3% doesn’t sound much, the inventors don’t need to spend a dollar, ever, to start making money off of their inventions.

This is new research from Harvard Business Review is worth a read. They analysed millions of employees of users of an innovation management platform called Spigit. If you only have 60 seconds, here are the take-aways;

1. Scale – more participants. To succeed, an innovation program needs lots of participants. It’s the wisdom of the crowd: a large mass of participants will always out-ideate a small group of smart people. On average, companies generate one idea for every four participants in the system.
2. Frequency – more ideas. To get to a set of promising ideas whose implementation would make sense, you need to sift through a lot of candidates. To succeed, a company needs to create frequent idea challenges for its employees. These challenges reinforce a culture of innovation and generate more ideas going into the pipeline. While there is a great deal of variation based on the types of ideas and the companies reviewing them, on average, it takes five idea candidates to generate one idea that the company judges to be worth implementing.
3. Engagement – more people evaluating ideas. It’s not enough to get some people suggesting ideas. You need lots of other people figuring out whether those ideas are worth working on, or what it will take for them to become better. A successful idea management system is a ferment of commentary, with lots of feedback.
4. Diversity – more kinds of people contributing. You might think the most productive innovation system would be full of engineers or other problem-solvers. You’d be wrong. A successful system needs contributions from all over the organization, especially staff who are close to the front lines: sales staff, support workers, or people in close touch with the company’s manufacturing processes, for example.

Again, well worth a read. For more information on the software platform that they studied the users of, click here.

I was working on a project recently and helping out with a roadshow at one of their sites. They were actively looking for ideas from employees. One chap came up to me and promptly told me his idea. Of course I said, “great idea, put it in the system” to which he replied, “nah, you put it in there for me”.

Of the thousands of people that work for this company 90+% of them will never admit to having an idea. Here’s one that had one, waiting for an opportunity to share with someone, but he chose not to share it (with anyone other than me). Why would that be?

It prompted quite some debate internally but I resolved to never understanding why he wouldn’t give it up, and in doing so get some credit for it.

Then, out of the blue, just as the idea collection campaign was closing, I noticed that same idea. So whatever the barriers were, he lowered them himself and put it in.

I had to track him down and ask him why it took him 3 weeks!

Eventually I caught up with him. The reason: his manager pestered and pestered so he put the idea in just to (his words) “get her off my back”.

Then another idea popped in from him. Then another, and this one WAS a brilliant idea. In-fact that one was perhaps one of the best ideas. It was to make every button in the home essentially a panic button.

The vital question is; would we have got that killer idea if we hadn’t have had the 2 or 3 average ideas?

I don’t believe so. I honestly don’t think that he held back giving me the average idea because he knew it was average.

The lesson, if there is one, is to work as hard as you need to in order to flip people from being someone that won’t share their ideas to someone that will. THEN (and only then) might we get the killer idea.