Fluevog's Open-Source Footwear

From Bill Taylor's Practically Radical Blog at HarvardBusiness.org. In lean times, there's nothing more valuable than a great new product idea. Why not invite your customers to share their creativity with your company -- and turn the best ideas into actual products! That's what legendary shoe designer John Fluevog has done, with a project he calls open-source footwear.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• bill
• taylor
• john
• fluevog
• innovation
• customers
• strategy

[katheryncruz24]

Not good.

[kbhambare]

A great thought and experiment. I wonder more about how actual interaction occurred between the company and customers. How did they set up the system?

[coetmor]

More like crowd-sourcing than mass customisation.

[guddaysunshine]

Maybee some women could comment on the shoes he is showing.

[leejacob120]

:( to this video

[dmuren]

ElasticLab and Delatroy - You're right on. This is, at best, semi-mass customization, and at worst, a gimick.

Think about the reality of this system. JF gets thousands of shoe submissions, many of them weird, insane, even crappy. You still need a number of "creatives" to choose the best designs, but now, these people are merely sifters, where they would have previously been designers.

The majority of customers don't get their ideal shoe. Designers don't get to design. Only management wins :(

[delatroy]

Isn't this just mass-customisation and commercializing the most popular designs?

[ElasticLab]

Wouldn't "open-source" footwear be a shoe with the pattern available freely online so others could make it? Asking customers to design a shoe is more like crowd-sourcing.

[omgavailablename]

please stop making videos when you're drunk

[Tedsuzan]

He's right: Mimes are really buff right now, and I'd love to design my own sneaker....cool.