Edison Nation: Edison Nation Provides a Bridge between Consumer-Inventors and Companies Seeking Innovative Product Ideas
Louis Foreman · Research-Technology Management · 2011
Innovation means a lot of things to a lot of different people. In the consumer product space, it is critically important because nearly 50 percent of revenue for consumer product companies comes from products that are less than two years old. That is an astounding fact--and it means that these companies have to dazzle consumers. They constantly have to give customers something new and improved. They always have to go the next step. Manufacturers and service providers have to use innovation to stay in front of the competition--to give consumers a reason to stay loyal to the brand. But there is good news for strong players in this space: innovation can be used to take market share away, to enter a space that is dominated by a leading brand. Innovation is critical for customer retention, but it is also the key to developing new markets and maintaining brand equity. In short, innovation is critical for survival. Companies that do not can't survive because eventually their products become commodities; competitors create their own versions, offering alternatives that are often cheaper and sometimes better. The overriding need to innovate or die has made companies desperate to find good ideas wherever they may arise. This includes looking outside the boundaries of the corporation, to other organizations, to individual inventors, even to consumers. Customers can be a great source of ideas; they are, after all, the ones whose needs products ultimately must meet to be successful. Consumers frequently have ideas for meeting those needs, but most will never bring those ideas to market. About 11 percent of the working population is entrepreneurs, which means 11 percent of the population is willing to assume risk for the sake of reward. The other 89 percent of the population may have great ideas, but they are not going to start businesses. Sometimes, this is due to a fear of risk-taking, but sometimes it is a lack of know-how and resources. As a result, some great ideas never get to the marketplace because consumers have no trusted way to get their ideas in front of companies who can use them. Those ideas represent a very rich, largely untapped source of innovation. So, how can companies get access to these great ideas? Accessing consumer ideas presents very real risks and requires an established trust on both sides. While inventors can't find pathways to share their ideas with businesses, companies don't always have the will, desire, or infrastructure to access and develop inbound ideas from the community. The Edison Nation model was conceived to bridge this gap, by linking inventors to companies seeking ideas via an intermediary that provides protection for both parties. Edison Nation accesses the creative brainpower of the community to meet the innovation needs of business. Accessing Individual Innovators Everyone has his or her own interpretation of innovation; a common definition of innovation is the art of discovering what is possible. For consumer products companies, it also means bringing differentiation to products that are prone to being commoditized. For instance, there is nothing obviously innovative about dishwashing soap. It is glycerin and water sold in a plastic bottle; it is traditionally stored under the sink, so the process of using the soap includes bending down, opening the cabinet, grabbing the bottle, squirting the soap into the sink or dishpan, and then putting the bottle back in the cabinet. It's been sold and used in this way for a long time, and it seems like a product that cannot be innovated. The entrepreneurs who started Method, an innovative cleaning products company focused on environmentally safe cleaning products, proved this assumption wrong. They hired an industrial designer--Karim Rashid--to design a better bottle, one that would look nice on the counter, and created a valve that allowed them to put the bottle's outlet on the bottom without having the contents leak out. …