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.

Do you want more users or the right users?

I'm a big fan of the Wall Street Journal. I became addicted to the paper while studying at the University of Northern Colorado. The college of business received a large supply of WSJ's every day and students were encouraged to grab one. I did. Every day. Towards the end of my time at UNC the paper became a talking point at the beginning of most of my classes. Professors were encouraged to use the WSJ as sort of a real-time textbook of sorts to augment what we were learning.

After graduating I was left with a conundrum: how to feed my addiction to the WSJ's reporting without breaking the bank. Subscriptions to the WSJ are prohibitively expensive for someone graduating into a recession with uncertain at best job prospects. So I did what most of my generation does: I went online. That was until I realized that many of the articles I wanted to read required a paid subscription.

Over the next several months I learned to get my info elsewhere--from sources that were free. Then I got an iPhone and installed the WSJ app. I was in love again. That was until earlier this week.

Upon opening the app for my several-times-a-day check of what's happening in the world, I was greeted by a message telling me that the WSJ app was going to a paid subscription model as well.

All of this got me thinking about the relationship between users and a service. Is it better to have more users or the right users? (this statement assumes that those users willing to pay for your service are the right users and that you can't have it both ways, i.e. having lots of users means having many that aren't your ideal user)

Services like the WSJ that have chosen to make users pay for content have seemingly determined that it is better to have the right users...or have they? Perhaps they've simply decided to generate more revenue regardless of whether the people they want reading their content are or not.

On the flip side there are a lot of examples of sources of content that are simply happy to have lots of users. In fact, many major blogs derive part of their value from having such a large and engaged following that is adding comments and interacting with their content.

I'm not sure that either way is right or wrong but I do feel that companies need to be thinking about questions like this when they decide to go to a subscription based model or when they likewise go to a free model. The old method of merely thinking about profits and losses is less applicable today. Today it's about users, engagement and content creation.

So what do you want? More users or the right ones?