Report by James Robinson at Pando Daily, on 'Quirky' - a platform for crowd-sourcing product design:

“On April 25, a smart air conditioner went on sale, a partnership between crowd-sourced manufacturer Quirky and GE. Its inventor, Dr. Garthen Leslie, was a former Department of Energy executive who had never manufactured a thing in his life. Leslie submitted the idea to Quirky on November 15 last year, where many of Quirky’s 800,000-plus members evaluated it, crowd-sourced ethnographic research, and voted on a name and tagline, before Quirky and GE got on with prototyping and manufacturing it.”

Quirky president, Doreen Lorenzo, explains what she sees as the benefits of this:

“...today the voice of the person that you want to use your product is available to you. With Quirky, the community tells us what the product should be, we know what they want, and you get this really interesting perspective.”

Quirky seems like an interesting experiment, and the commitment to customer-driven products is admirable, but I see 2 main problems with their approach:

Can crowd-sourcing design bring the refinement necessary for a hit product? ‘Design by committee’ is often thought to bring mediocre results - the famous line is that a camel is a horse designed by committee - and this is because there is no one there to say "no". And as we all know, saying "no" is the most important part of product development.
The ‘customers’ that are giving feedback on design are only a small subset of the potential customer base. Focusing only on the comments of the niche type of customer that participates in crowd-source manufacturing risks missing the bigger picture. The product needs of Quirky members may (very likely) not be the same as those of the wider market.