You might not know the term “nugget ice,” but you’d probably recognize the product. It’s the delightfully chewable frozen kernels found inside hospitals, hipster cocktail bars, and Sonic drive-ins. GE, a multibillion dollar corporation with hundreds of employees worldwide, had an R&D team that built a tiny compressor to make nugget ice. But what to do with it? Would nugget ice really sell a $3,500 refrigerator? So the technology sat inside GE’s library of unused intellectual property.
That was until GE Appliances (sold off by GE to Haier in 2016) used its FirstBuild program, a rapid prototyping open platform for makers, headquartered in Kentucky, to crowdsource the design of a countertop nugget ice maker. The resulting product became the Opal, which raised $3 million through crowdfunding on Indiegogo. For the $150 billion GE, it was a small but notable win: With nugget ice, GE struck a chord with crowdsourced consumer tastes that it could have never reached through its traditional, big-box store channels.
In other words, the GE brand is launching a Behance that ships, a Kickstarter product bootcamp for corporations that don’t get design thinking, or, perhaps most apt, a Quirky 2.0. Before it folded in 2015, Quirky crowdsourced product ideas from anyone, then attempted to turn these ideas into products. The idea was ultimately unscalable, because Quirky had the onus of inventing and selling countless products from nothing but a one-line pitch.
“Giddy is designed so you can solve a lot of problems on it,” says Giddy CEO Taylor Dawson. “For the most part, it’s an engagement between a company and a community for a specific piece of work.”
Dawson is an unlikely voice in the world of tech, literally. He speaks with the friendly drawl of southerner rather than the glib inspiration-quotes of someone in the Valley. The GE designer-engineer launched FirstBuild in 2014, which was essentially GE internalizing the Quirky model (GE was an early, major partner for Quirky, and the two companies launched multiple products together).
“That went sharply against any of the prevailing notions of what a countertop ice maker should look like,” says Dawson, who points to the value of looking outside one’s own corporation for good ideas. “Go to Amazon now and search ‘ice maker,’ you’ll see 30 to 40 designs. Thirty-nine of those 40 ice makers look the same . . . [but] that’s a typical approach within companies. You’re given a task to complete, you go with the most-known path to get a product to market as fast as possible.”
On one hand, the value proposition for companies is clear: Giddy is a place where you could get a few good ideas for a product, all while testing out an idea without putting the full weight of a company behind it. Giddy offers the potential to build excitement and feel out new markets, and offers a step a corporation might take before going to Kickstarter (where you might not need a product, but you need a well-developed idea). It’s a low-risk place to take a stab at building community engagement, and perhaps, develop the next viral hit.
“Giddy [products] don’t necessarily need to be commercialized,” says Dawson. “Think about the funnel of how ideas go to product. There are 10,000 ideas for every product. Sometimes you find a great way to create a product out of an idea, sometimes you don’t. . . . Firstbuild launches 10 to 12 products a year. Three out of those become successful products they add to their portfolio. I don’t think that means they’re doing something wrong, but something right. They’re doing things on the edge of their understanding. Some things won’t get traction, so we put them aside and move on to the next project.”
Now that Giddy is available to both corporations, we’ll see if companies actually sign up–and if 100 designers typing on 100 keyboards really can make a masterpiece.