This Friday, we are travelling to Boston/MA for the MCPC 2007 World Conference of Mass Customization and Personalization which is the primary event in this domain. Bridging between academic research and management practice, the conference aims to provide an interactive platform to learn about strategies and to discuss the latest technologies and enablers. We will be visiting the academic part at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, from October 7-10 2007, with an interdisciplinary focus on the new advancements in the field. The second part, we won’t take part in anymore, will take place at HEC Business School in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in the form of a business seminar.

The conference is jointly organized by MIT Media Lab, MIT Design Lab, RWTH Aachen University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and HEC Montréal Business School (École des Hautes Études Commerciales). The conference shall bring together different voices and thinking on the topic from an interdisciplinary perspective. The interdisciplinary approach comprises the perspectives of management and economics, engineering, design and information technology from an academic as well as a practitioners’ perspective. The MCPC will become the largest event in the field of mass customization and personalization, with more than 150 keynotes, presentations, panels etc. on the topic. Further information is provided by Frank Piller, RWTH Aachen, who holds the function of Program Chair of the conference.

We are looking forward to meet many interesting people there, we would be glad to have lots of inspiring talks with. Hopefully, we will be also able to speak to some people at MIT Media Lab. If someone of our readers is visiting the conference as well, just give us a note and we would be glad meeting you there for discussion and social exchange.

The Open Innovation Community fellowforce, just announced the launch of a great widget/toolkit to enable customer and leaduser integration for companies of all sizes:

The ‘Innovate Us’ button is like a ‘Digg-this’ application for innovation, empowering and encouraging consumers to submit ideas to company controlled (Fellowforce enabled) innovation boxes. “We prefer to call them Innovation Boxes because consumer participation is more than just a feedback tool”, adds Crites, “it’s a driver for innovation. And for companies, this is like having a souped-up RSS aggregator to manage idea feeds.”

The basic ‘Innovate Us’ button is free of charge and takes just minutes to install. Companies can upgrade for full facilitation, customization and complete open innovation box solutions. With basic or premium, companies can easily manage ideas from submission to implementation. Consumers can see status reports on their submissions, so the process is transparent between parties. And soon, Fellowforce will launch an Innovation Forum, giving companies the option to take ‘Innovate Us’ ideas into the open for feedback from Fellows. (via prweb.com)

With this solution, fellowforce provides various ways (idea challenges, suggestion-boxes for specific product improvements) to integrate leaduser and customers even for small companies with minimal R&D budgets.  This could be an important step to democratize the innovation process.

Another extraordinary interesting example supporting our concept of Open Entrepreneurship is the platform CreateSpace by Amazon.com, a new online service for media on demand. The company is not charging setup fees for books, audio CDs, DVDs, Blue-Ray media and digital video downloads, enabling authors, filmmakers and musicians to offer their works to millions of customers worldwide and to determine the prices for their products themself. One could say, of course simplified, that CreateSpace is the Spreadshirt for media content of any kind.

The concept of CreateSpace from our point of view holds the potential to heavily jumble the publishing landscape up. Hereby it is shown once more, what fundamental consequences for the way we are understanding the economic coherences, the creation of value in networks can have. Artists had until now only the opportunity to achieve the publishing of their works by intermediaries like the big publishing companies for example with their affiliated distribution channels. A publishing within the framework of self publishers was markedly expensive and furthermore because of missing distribution channels less promising. Now, everyone can operate his own publishing house over an outstanding distribution channel like Amazon.com and is able to both publish his self created media and on behalf of third-party artists. The service seems to be useful especially for small editions, for instance the publishing of scientific work like dissertations.

With Amazon, there is opening one of the largest distribution networks worldwide for the first time, being a classic player in E-Commerce, for the creation of value in networks or, as we call it, Open Entrepreneurship. Seen from the perspective of Amazon, this makes sense in several ways. First and foremost, Amazon is ensuring exclusive access to media contents of a huge amount of media creators, massively expanding its already very far reaching Long Tail. Secondly, Amazon enlarges as a producer of record carriers for media its margins compared to its function as a distributor enourmously. Through a sale over Amazon.com, the company earns for instance with a single DVD 45 percent of the purchase price and through a sale over the CreateSpace E-Store anyhow 15 percent, each time plus a fixed charge per unit of 4,95 dollar. For instance, the Open Publisher earns through the sale of a DVD for the purchase price of 20 dollars via Amazon.com in the end just 6 dollars. On the other hand, this can be clearly overcompensated by the scalability of the distribution channel. It is very clever by the way, that Amazon reserved the right to give discounts on the products, only eating into Amazon’s margin leaving the earnings of the seller the same.

Especially because of the distribution model, the service of CreateSpace seems to be extremely interesting on the whole. Almost the complete infrastructure of Amazon.com is accessible and shipping is possible within 24 hours after receiving the order. All on demand books are automatically eligible for Search Inside!, Amazon Prime, Super Saver Shipping and other Amazon.com programs as well. Just by the interplay with the Amazon.com community, true creation of value in networks will become possible and we can wait eagerly for the upcoming developments. Welcome, Open Publishing!

We`ve stumbled on an interesting speach of Charles Leadbeater about Open Innovation and Lead User Entrepreneurship at the TED-Conference in 2005:

In this deceptively casual talk, Charles Leadbeater weaves a tight argument that innovation isn’t just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can’t. He describes the rising role of serious amateurs (”Pro-Ams,” as he calls them) through the story of the mountain bike. (TED)

TED is an interesting organization committed to the spreading of radical innovations and important ideas. To realize this ambitious approach they arrange a big conference “bringing together 1000 of the world’s most remarkable people” once a year. On their great website you can find various recordings of the conference-speaches. In general the speakers are extraordinary and absolutely absorbing. You might be specially interested in the videos of Collaboration and Not business as usual.

Google announced an viral video-competion:

Add your clip to this video:
Help us imagine how an email message travels around the world. Take a look at the collaborative video we started, and then film what happens next. We’ll rotate a selection of the clips we receive on this page, and add the best ones to the video. The final video will be featured on the Gmail homepage and seen by users worldwide.

More about the contest and first uploads on the gmail-blog

German economic magazine Brand Eins has published its first article in English: “Disturbed” by Wolf Lotter.

“As Germany embarks on a search for the creative industries, the key to the knowledge society, it is encountering a class that somehow doesn’t quite fit in.”

Very interestingly and well written, Lotter describes the fight between the inhibited ones and the disturbed ones in society.

Read On: Brand Eins Article

Companies that keep their intellectual property too close to the vest risk missing out on critical business innovations that idea-sharing could generate. Open business models foster collaboration with customers and suppliers to everyone’s benefit.

http://www.techweb.com/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=196700904&pgno=1

While being not a new phenomenom, crowdsouricing is really growing as a business trend.

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2007/id20070118_768179.htm