Napkin Labs visits Boulder Digital Works

During last Wednesday's Idea Studio at Boulder Digital Works, Napkin Labs co-founders Warren Ng and Riley Gibson stopped by to talk about starting up their company and how its model is changing the way companies handle product design.

What does Napkin Labs do?

Napkin Labs is a collaborative community based new product development consultancy. We are blending the creative energy of the 'crowd' with disciplined design processes to rapidly generate consumer-centric new product concepts rooted in the strengths of our clients' brands.

In other words, they curate a community of some the best young minds (from places like Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and CU) and then set them loose on your project. They provide the structure throughout so everyone stays on track and incentivize participation by using an algorithm to measure how much each member contributed to the final output and paying out a reward accordingly.

Their approach goes beyond simple crowd-sourcing by: one, curating the people in their crowd and two, rewarding everyone based on participation rather than a winner-takes-all approach.

And then I was re-listening to this 2005 TED talk from Clay Shirky about institutions vs collaboration and I realized that Napkin Labs is essentially breaking down the institutional barriers he talks about here:


Shirky mentions how that as barriers to collaboration decrease (the web and web apps like Napkin Labs) people become more and more able to organize and collaborate in increasingly complex ways without the help traditionally needed from institutions. Shirky's vision is brought to life in exactly how Napkin Labs operates.

By connecting big organizations directly to crowds and managing the crowds in a hands-off way, Napkin Labs brings the best of both the institutional and the unruly masses worlds together. As institutions become more comfortable with this approach I think this will mean a sea-change will take place in the R&D world. Certainly, highly trained scientists and researches will never be replaced but think about the example Shirky uses above where a single Linux engineer contributes a single important patch and nothing else. He's probably not worth having on the payroll, but aren't you glad he contributed that one really important piece?

I believe the same sort of scenario will begin to play out across R&D and product design. While dedicated teams in institutions won't be replaced anytime soon, a lot of their work will begin to be offered out to Napkin Labs-esque organizations with excellent results.

It's exciting to see this glimpse into the future happen so close to home. Keep your eyes peeled for how Napkin Labs will help shape the future with your help.