If you haven't heard of kickstarter.com, it a website that allows individuals to get crowd funding for ideas that they would like to pursue, but lack the money to do so. Recently a kickstarter project was funded with $4.4 million dollars in preorders.
http://news.yahoo.com/multimillion-dollar-pebble-watch-kickerstarter-really-grows-185456553.html
Kickstarter is a game changer and I would like to briefly discuss how it will affect strategy for major corporations. Now anyone can come up with an idea, do a little bit of leg work to get drawings or renderings of their concept and make a video and post their idea online the next day. The idea can be funded in less than 2 months and backers can add suggestions of changes they would like to see in order to make the product better. So how can a corporation compete? Corporations typically take years doing R&D and Market research before a product can be released and often times these products still fail when brought to the market.
Kickstarter has lowered barriers to entry for a firm to get in business with a product that is only funded if people are willing to pay for it.
Corporations may need to restructure their value chain by working more directly with its community of customers first and then building a product/solution according to customer interest. Of course this also raises the threat of competitors and substitute products because it leaves the product idea out in the open and reduces IP protection.
It is not clear how the corporate world will adapt to this model, but they will need to find a way to leverage the wisdom of crowds to prevent the average Joe from coming up with a competing product that gets funded over night.
