On my recent trip to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, my eye caught the logo of company exhibiting in a small booth. There were about four people there, with stacks of small boxes all around the booth. How could I not stop and ask what a company called “Quirky” did?

Turns out, they have a very innovative business model for product design and development. On their website, they have created a community for designers/thinkers/makers who collaborate with the stated goal of creating a brand new consumer product every WEEK. Everyone who participates gets a piece of the revenue of the launched product, with the inventor or idea catalyst getting the lion’s share, while others who provide feedback, comments, etc. get a relative portion, based on their feedback.

Once everything is locked down on the design side, the product goes on pre-sale on the website to assure that tooling costs are covered. Once a certain threshold of sales is hit, then the product actually goes into production and revenues start to get distributed. Since launching last summer, the site has 6 products that have cleared the threshold with another 17 in line waiting. A very clever idea indeed, creating a collaborative space for inventors who up to now, usually labor/suffer as individuals.

Could this idea be applied to service design as well? Sure (and probably is in various forms on the Web) but it’s much more difficult, since service ideas and concepts are much more “portable” and easy to launch than the logistics involved in actually creating manufacturing molds, tools, packaging, shipping, etc. Still, a great model of innovative thinking. Here’s a quick video…

We heard a story the other day from a large infrastructure service company that has over a thousand field service personnel on the road on any given day, around the country. One of the senior executives did a ride-along with one of these long-time employees and heard an interesting story.

“You know, I’ve been driving this van for about 16 years now, going to people’s homes to help them out, or going to troubleshoot at one of our field facilities. For years, I always felt that I was part of a bigger team of people, you know? I’d be driving along and I’d hear the dispatcher coming over the radio calling out assignments to different techs. I’d hear those voices go back and forth and I’d have a feeling for what was going on around me, you know? So, if maybe Jim got assigned to a big issue about a mile away and it was raining, I might swing by there to see if he needed help. Or I might check in with him on the radio. But ever since we got these GPS systems and smartphones a few years ago, I just get text messages from central dispatch telling me where to go next. I go through an entire day never hearing any human voices of people I work with anymore, and frankly, I feel like I’m out here all alone. In fact, I don’t even feel like I’m part of the company anymore.”

The beauty – and terror – of service design is that it all revolves around people. Certainly, we want to leverage technology to make every process run more smoothly but we also have to keep in mind the collateral damage incurred by such choices. In order to provide an outstanding customer experience, service personnel need to feel as though they are part of a larger mission, and community. How has technology disintermediated your employees from your own company and culture?