Over at Fluevog Shoes they are using crowd sourcing to find and select new designs for their innovative style of footwear. They called it Fluevog’s Open Source Footwear
and what it means is that some of their new shoe designs are selected..
“…through a combination of peer voting, feasibility and if we just plain like the designs. Then, we cover all the costs & development process (it takes about a year to produce a shoe) and get your shoe onto the market, without having to put our prices up or go broke. Always a bonus. It’s worked beautifully and you’ve proven that Fluevogers have more to say than just, “Way rad, dude”. You do it; we love it. Bring it on.”
Other companies allow for the design of product to some degree. For example, Nike used the web to allow customers to customize an individual’s shoes. But Fluevog is a much more involved approach. Very Web 2.0!
So if you have always wanted to design shoes — or just see how others go about innovating — check out the site.
How is that open source? Are they giving away the styles for others to modify/improve? Seems like “crowd-sourced” is a more suitable (and accurate) title for their footwear.