This post is by Michael Pollock, the original owner of Small Business Branding. Yaro Starak now owns and produces the latest content for this blog.
>> Return to the Small Business Branding front page <<
Great article in Fortune: The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy.
It could just as easily have said: "The Amazing Rise of the Savvy Solopreneur Economy."
"It used to be that a tinkerer like Misterovich
could, at best, hope to sell his idea to a big company. More likely,
he’d entertain friends with his Pez-sized visions. But a number of
factors are coming together to empower amateurs in a way never before
possible, blurring the lines between those who make and those who take.
Unlike the dot-com fortune hunters of the late 1990s, these
do-it-yourselfers aren’t deluding themselves with oversized visions of
what they might achieve. Instead, they’re simply finding a wayâ€â€in this
mass-produced, Wal-Mart worldâ€â€to take power back, prove that they can
make the products that they want to consume, have fun doing so,
and, just maybe, make a few dollars. ‘What’s happened is a tremendous
change in awareness,’ says Eric von Hippel, a professor at the MIT
Sloan School of Management and author of the recent Democratizing Innovation. ‘Conventional wisdom is so strong [in business] about
find-a-need-and-fill-it: ‘We’re the manufacturers; we design products;
we ask users what they need; we do it.’ That has begun to crack.’"
There’s that word again: USERS.
Hat-tip to smallbusiness.com for the link.