Collective Innovation: A new paradigm for new product development

Increasingly new product development is taking place outside of formal R&D departments. Individuals are taking on the responsibility of attracting and managing the social, financial, and human capital traditionally supplied by manufacturers. Despite the central role of open, ubiquitous, and social technology in supporting people's ability to work together to produce something that they could not produce alone, we know little about this new paradigm for product development. My talk will describe collective innovation, a process that harnesses diverse and untapped capital from distributed networks to discover, evaluate, and implement ideas. I will discuss opportunities and barriers to a process that increases the breadth and speed of product development while decreases dependence on manufacturing centered product development.

Dr. Gerber works at the intersection of design, human computer interaction, and management science to understand and design the future of product development. Liz is the Co-Director of the newly launched Center for Human Computer Interaction + Design, Co-Director of the Design Research Council, and Faculty Founder of Design for America, winner of Cooper Hewitt's Institutional Achievement Award. Dr. Gerber co-directs Northwestern's interdisciplinary Delta Lab whose mission is to design technology-based systems to support collaboration. Dr. Gerber has received awards for her work from the National Science Foundation, Joyce, MacArthur, Mozilla, and Watson Foundations, Microsoft, and Adobe. Dr. Gerber earned her Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering and M.S. in Product Design at Stanford University.