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The idea remains his, but the description is used by a panel of potential users, which
is anybody that wants to participate, and they decide what the best ideas are by voting
for them.
Ideas are bubbling up through a process that is called ideation. Every week they
take the top idea. They have a couple of designers who work with the guy that came
up with the idea and transform the idea into actual products. They file the patents.
They are going to find where and who can manufacture it. And finally they sell the
product on the internet and through a distribution channel they built up over the years.
The inventor of the idea shares the revenue with the company. They have created a
company to do business process innovation. They created a new business process
taking advantage of new technologies to do something new, interesting isn't it? This is
the process that they have actually put in place.
On the website, you can find some of the products. For example, one product
which is really simple: it makes a heck of a lot of money and was invented by a guy
out of Norway. You know, these power strips that we all have. I am pretty sure you
have been in the situation where you plug in a charger and it sits half way above the
next plug, so you cannot use the plug. Well, the Norwegian guy said why don't we
make one that can just sort of move around, simple isn't it? Well, he brought that idea
to the website and the user community found it a great idea. Quirky created it and
they both made a ton of money out of it. So, the submitted ideas do not need to be
difficult.
Let me end up with the third example. I have a little story around this one. I was
one day on a train to Amsterdam, reading some documents on cloud computing. A
young guy is sitting near to me and he says, oh sir, are you in cloud computing? I said
yes, and he answered me too. So I asked him, what are you doing and he said well I'm
working for a GPS company. Hmm, a GPS company - cloud computing, explain this,
I don't see the link. He goes on, well, our GPS company is quite successful. OK and
that's an issue, success - issue, sorry I don't get it. He explains, well, the problem is as
follows, you're driving along the road, in front of you there is a traffic jam. Your GPS
gets a signal that there is a traffic jam and calculates an alternate route. The problem
is, all of our GPSs use the same algorithm, so they calculate the same alternate route.
Everybody takes the alternate route and, because there are many, you get a GPS
enabled traffic jam! Frankly, I had never thought about that one. He said, so, now
what we're trying to do is to understand where the different GPSs are, suck all of that
information back into the cloud and calculate from a cloud perspective according to
how many there are and the situation around the traffic jam alternate routes so that
different people can take different routes. We then feed that back to the different
GPSs. A way to use cloud computing to really start improving the customer
experience. Isn't that great? That is an example of a product/service combination to
improve customer experience. So next time you take your GPS, you will think about
the GPS-enabled traffic jam. I am pretty sure about that one.
5
The Internet of Things
Okay, but these are just simple examples. The world is actually going one step
further. You will hear more and more about something which is called the Internet of
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