Behind Quirky's crowdsourcing model, which promises to bring hardware products to market faster
The Invention Mob, Brought to You by Quirky — As inventions go, Jake Zien's was a clever fix rather than an imaginative breakthrough: Irritation was the mother of his invention.
Context & Ripple Effects
This NYT feature is the sympathetic profile of Quirky at its peak: Jake Zien's Pivot Power and the wider '[[a:entity|Invention Mob]]' process — community-submitted ideas voted on, then manufactured in-house — held up as proof that crowds could compress hardware timelines. Read against later coverage, it captures the model at maximum confidence, months before the cracks showed.
What came next reframes the whole piece: Quirky was shipping money-losing inventions and cutting a third of its staff within weeks, dropped manufacturing outright by mid-year, filed Chapter 11 in September selling Wink to Flextronics for $15M, and relaunched as a licensing business — with GE Appliances' Giddy later reviving the idea inside a corporate parent.
First-order effects
- Quirky bears the full tooling and inventory cost of every crowd-selected product while community votes, not unit economics, drive the pipeline — so volume scales losses alongside wins like Zien's.
Second-order effects
- Once the loss rate surfaces, Quirky exits manufacturing entirely and shops its Wink smart-home platform to Flextronics, converting an owned-factory model into an asset sale to fund a pivot.
Third-order effects
- Crowdsourced product development doesn't die with the bankruptcy: Quirky relaunches licensing designs rather than building them, and Haier-owned GE Appliances spins out Giddy — evidence the model survives only when someone else owns the manufacturing risk.
The trend: Crowdsourced hardware is migrating from maker-owned factories to design-and-license platforms, where corporate manufacturers absorb the production risk the crowd model couldn't carry.