Sunday, July 09, 2006
The question
So I've been reading, thinking, and doing general brainstorming to get this party started. The question I'm honing in on is the following:
End-users are becoming more and more vocal in the market. They're also becoming increasingly savvy (think kids these days already versed in using GUIs, accessing the internet, etc...). They are progressively taking the form of producers, or at least collaboraters rather than staying as simply consumers. Some are considered nich market audiences, but through the power of the internet these audiences are grouping up stronger than ever. Can these folks affect the future of the producer/consumer market? Should corporations pay more attention?
I'd love to hear your thoughts!
End-user revolution has been common in many industries. But you should be careful on measuring it's value.
From the corporation perspective, end-users usually create value in terms of testing product. End-user activity revolution does not necessarily always generate financial benefits to corporation(sometimes it does). End-users enhance products in terms of their preferences and interests. It means the enhancement is for a set of multiple niche markets, which is not most corporations like.
One area that needs to be more researched on is end-user revolution in "information good" industry. A Korean knowledge search engine has become so successful just because of the end-user revolution. This site has stored very deep and broad knowledges on every side of human life in DB, and most of the knowledges have come from end-user. The website doesn't even provide any incentive for each knowledge(maybe displying the user's ID on the top of each knowledge). This example well explains that in the information good industry corporation could get significant benefit from end-user innovation.
By
Anonymous, at
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 10:01:00 AM