Bill Taylor, author of Mavericks at Work, challenged the audience to tap into the wisdom of their customers. He talked about a shoe designer, John Fluevog, who learned about Linux, open source, and how grassroots contributors can create someting great. He decided to take the same approach to footwear, and asked his customers to submit designs for shoes. They had 300 finalists, and have made 10 different designs of shoes.
Didn’t pay them, but named the shoe after the designer. The lesson is that you can learn amazing things from the people who may never work for you. It can even go further: Threadless is a company that makes t-shirts with designs that customers submit and vote on. They are a framework for expressing their customers’ creativity. He brought up Tim O’Reilly’s phrase: “The architecture of participation.”