Second wind of the era of invention

The release of the new iPhone models has led to the emergence of understandable and not very good products that complement it. That is how Mophie came into being - the first business of entrepreneur Ben Kaufman (in 2005, he published an iPhone case capable of maintaining the charge of the device). After a few years, Ben realized that the consumer / user wants not just to buy, but to invent independently. So in 2009, his second company Quirky appeared . Ben is clearly trying to revive the era of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. We offer excerpts from his interview (translation of the article Reinventing Invention: Quirky Lets You and a Modern-Day Edison ).

Quirky team introduces new products to the market every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at noon, while the entire production process is based on team collaboration and is built in an interesting way. To begin with, members of a large community of companies offer a multitude of ideas and bring them to a general court, which votes “for” or “against.” On Thursday evening, the Quirky team in live mode evaluates about 15 ideas that scored the most votes, and selects from 3 to 5, launching them into development. At all stages of working on a product, community members offer various options for the development and modernization of the product being manufactured: if these ideas are accepted, their author receives “bonuses” that are transformed into real money when the product starts to be sold.

One of the most active members of the Quirky community, Mark Zah, a copywriter from Hamburg (he was one of the first visitors to the site), has already contributed to the development of 12 successful products and earned $ 45,971.
')
Quirky's many successful products are simple household goods. What, besides "simplicity", is included in the recipe for a good Quirky product?
Most truly good products solve a particular problem, so there are two main things that I look at before embarking on an idea. The product must be either "magical", or it must solve a burning issue. A good product combines both of these qualities. People often equate magic and invention, and I think that in many ways it really is, because in the first seconds, when you see something new, you think that this is a real miracle.

An interesting fact is that at the exit, Quirky's product is slightly different from the sum of ideas proposed by the creators in the production process. We are no longer looking for a specific solution, but rather a clearly formulated problem. For us, it does not matter much how a prototype or a 3D model will be presented. The main questions I ask are: Has this person found a real problem? How many people came across her? Does this idea have potential (in terms of design, production, etc.)? Can we realize it really well, make this idea innovative?

Were there any projects to which members of the community did not react, despite the fact that the team considered the product to be brilliant?
In fact, these are two sides of the same coin: sometimes we adore our idea, but members of the community do not like it. Sometimes the opposite. We are always working to achieve understanding, and at such moments I realize that we are doing a good job. The process of finding a compromise is quite fascinating, because it rarely happens that everyone agrees. Rather, it is even wrong and means that the product still has flaws.

We had one product, which we called Bandits (by the way, the idea of ​​Mark Zah) - an elastic band with an attached hook. What then, what now, I still think that this idea is incomprehensible to my mind, but it does not matter! And precisely because of this principle, Quirky lives and functions. In any other company there would be a person who said, “This is nonsense, we will not do it,” but our product found its market and became one of the best-selling!

The voting system resembles the Reddit site, which is similar to massive spam. Have you encountered the problem of self-promotion?
We are different from many other platforms, called by my unloved word "crowdsourcing". You can promote your idea, spam to death, but if I don’t like the idea, then I don’t like it, regardless of the number of votes. We always weigh everything carefully. Sometimes it happens that an idea gets too few votes, although our team is confident that this is an uncut diamond, because we know the market and its needs. And then we understand that the idea would be much more popular if the community had the knowledge of the market that we have.

In this matter, it is important to be completely open to the community. I know that people always keep their best ideas to themselves, sometimes sharing them with my family. These ideas define their essence, explain who they really are. I ask people to tell about their ideas, and he does so because they trust me. That is why I never hide anything from them: all discussions and workflows are open, all sales are clear and easy to calculate, at any time you can find out what we are working on.

Who are the inventors of Quirky?
It is not easy for me to answer this question. We cannot know who the members of our community are. We tried: it turned out that the inventors were retirees, housewives, 15-year-olds, people on the road to nowhere ... Each of them has an idea, because we interact with everyone without exception. Quirky is open to everyone.

Thomas Edison argued that genius consists of 1% inspiration and 99% hard work. Is this statement appropriate to the inventors of Quirky?
That's right, with the only condition that we do just 99% of this hard work for people. Geniuses are in the idea, but the most important thing is not how to come up with, but how to realize it.

Speaking of moving ahead: how strong is your business model?
It defines our future all this time, so I am sure that it is strong enough. I don’t think that the passage of time will have a strong influence on a similar business model. If the world decides that electromagnetic energy is what it needs, we will release products related to it. If people decide that they do not need more products, but they need applications, we will make applications.

It seems to us that in Russia it is also possible to make such a company successful. The question is what to base on: customer-oriented marketing? Design thinking? Something else?