The second day of MCPC 2007 saw keynote speeches from Professor William J. Mitchell from MIT Media Lab and School of Architecture, Kent Larson, also from MIT Media Lab and School of Architecture, and my personal favourite, Professor Eric von Hippel from MIT Sloan School of Management. Von Hippel is well known for being among the first to talk about user innovation - the way that consumers modify, improve or invent products which meet their needs better than manufacturers’ standard offerings - and his presentation today, entitled “Toolkits for Collaborative User Innovation,” talked about ways in which companies can enable and benefit from users’ knowledge and creativity.

From watching von Hippel present, I got the feeling he is an accomplished speaker who deliberately overstates his case in order to create a memorable impression. Thus I took with a pinch of salt his assertion that in future, expert users who freely reveal their designs in the spirit of the open source movement will swamp manufacturers who try to protect their inventions behind patents. Nonetheless he had some interesting examples to back up his argument, in particular the case of the kite surfacing community.

Kite surfing is the sport in which riders use a short surf board and a powerful kite to increase speed and jump into the air, often performing acrobatic tricks. According to von Hippel, it first began as an underground sport, with only a few devotees who freely shared information about the best designs, materials and techniques. As the sport grew in popularity, a number of companies began to produce commercial designs; however at about the same time a website, Zeroprestige.org, was set up to better facilitate the sharing of information among the kite surfing community. The size and expertise of the community, including at least one highly-trained aerodynamicist, was such that designs posted to the site were better than those being commercially released, and many of the companies withdrew from the business.Since there are always two sides to every story, I’d be interested to know if this example has been ’spun’ to better make a case. I also wonder how successful this approach would be as the market became bigger and expanded outside the expert enthusiasts into those who do not have the time, skill or inclination to build their own equipment. You can read more about this, and other examples, in Eric von Hippel’s book Democratizing Innovation (free download).

Of the breakout sessions that I attended, two in particular stood out. The first was by Xiaoyan Deng of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who presented an experiment conducted using NIKEiD’s toolkit for the design of custom sports shoes. Deng’s experiment involved 192 participants, who were asked to customise a Nike sports shoe (the choice of which shoe was restricted). The first, perhaps not surprising result, was that every participant created a unique shoe. The participants were then invited, after either one or four weeks, to follow up the experiment in an evaluation exercise. 30 designs were presented to each participant, one of which was their own, nine of which were professional Nike designs, and 20 of which were designed by other participants. The subjects were asked to identify their own design (over two thirds were able to do this) and which design they preferred. The preference rating for the participants’ own designs was twice the average, but interestingly they also scored other participants’ designs higher than those of the professional designers.

The second session was by Kate Herd of Middlesex University and also concerned a toolkit used to customise sports shoes, this time Puma’s Mongolian Barbecue. Herd’s research is looking at the design of the user experience surrounding customisation toolkits and how this affects the participation of the consumer. The basic premise is that customisation is a valuable brand touchpoint and as such the customisation experience needs to be designed with as much care as the toolkit or the product itself. Herd demonstrated this with the example of Puma, whose Mongolian Barbecue she felt to be innovative and useful in its use of actual materials (in-store) as part of the customisation process. This was let down though by the lack of any uniqueness to the sales procedure (a standard till receipt with no image of the shoe ordered), a number of days wait before a confirmation e-mail is received, and no indication of the exact date the shoes will be delivered. Puma have obviously spent a lot of time thinking about the customisation procedure, it is a shame it’s let down by what is essentially bad service.