In a world where collaboration and innovation are becoming mainstream concepts, Ben Kaufman has acted on the idea by creating Quirky.com as a way to help use community to drive great ideas forward. I’ll definitely be watching and, who knows, maybe you’ll see my Soup Cubes in the market one of these days thanks to Ben and all of our friends.Many behold the overwhelming abundance of products at the mall, the big-box store or even Amazon.com and conclude: That’s enough; we don’t need any more new stuff to consider buying. Ben Kaufman doesn’t see things that way. He is sure that he is not alone. “Everyone,” he says, “has a product idea.” It’s probably true: even as we piously lament the endless and wasteful junk that clutters the material world, plenty of us are simultaneously pondering some hypothetical doodad that we are sure would be a retail hit.
A few months ago, Kaufman, who is 22 and lives in New York, started a business aimed squarely at the armchair inventors among us. Quirky.com is meant to bring “community developed” products to the marketplace. For example: Marc Julian Zech, an advertising copywriter in Hamburg, Germany, had an idea for a double-sided mini hard drive (one USB plug might hold personal data, the other work data). He submitted his notion to Quirky.com, and now, a few weeks later, the Split Stick is being manufactured …
