Academic
I’ve been talking and writing about Virtual Communities and Mass Customisation for several years, at some point I’ll aggregate some of those presentations and whitepapers here.
1. Do consumers want to design unique products on the internet? A study of the online Virtual Community of Threadless.com and their attitudes to Mass Customisation, Mass Production and Collaborative Design. – 2006 Undergraduate Dissertation.
This is my original Threadless dissertation, a result of some empirical research I undertook with the company and its Virtual Community way back in 2006. This was for my undergraduate dissertation. While it’s showing its age now, it has been well received over the years by people studying this area. I’d recommend you my second paper “Is the best product a unique product?” from 2008 which is an updated version of this research, much shorted and more focused. If you like that paper come back and read this one which is twice as long and has a much more extensive literature review.
Do consumers want to design unique products on the internet? A study of the online Virtual Community of Threadless.com and their attitudes to Mass Customisation, Mass Production and Collaborative Design Do consumers want to design unique products on the internet? A study of the online Virtual Community of Thr…
2. “Is the best product a unique product? A case study exploring alternatives to Mass Customisation with the online Virtual Community of Threadless” – 2008 white paper, modified version of which will soon be published in Making Customer Centricity Work: Advances in Mass Customization and Personalization By F. Piller and M. Tseng, World Scientific Press.
3. Assorted blog posts on the topics of Virtual Communities, Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing:
- Community is King Series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
- Design Contests vs Mass Production – Crowdsourcing Q&A at Tee-Junction
- HipHipUK meets crowdsourcing design contest Design By Humans: Part 1, Part 2
- Which risks and problems will companies, that run Crowdsourcing business models, face in the future? Amongst other things on thezig
- Running a design contest – a review of the logo design contest Open Logo Project 1.6 for Spreadshirt at olp1.6
