Read interesting article on Frank Pillers blog about the future customisation strategy of Nike. Full review coming planned for later.

The Threadless guys kindly agreed for me to add my dissertation to HipHipUK entitled

“Do consumers want to design unique products on the internet?”
A study of the online Virtual Community of Threadless.com and their attitudes to Mass Customisation, Mass Production and Collaborative Design.

It will go up later today but the page is ready here http://www.hiphipuk.co.uk/research/

I surveyed over 200 hundred people from the Threadless Community and the result is 85 fun packed pages of research, pretty graphs, bad spelling and grammar all about Virtual Communities, Involvement vs Uniqueness, Manufacturing Approaches, Design Contests, oh and tshirts.

I didnt want it to sit gathering dust with the ideas going out of date, so hopefully somebody might find it useful.

I’ll also use some of the content on future posts here in the next few weeks/months.

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, I guess I’m not sure where to go with hiphipUK as traffic is rather stagnant and even posts like the Threadless one fail to generate much by way of discussion. I’ve also been planning on expanding out the topics I post from just the tshirt industry to my other interest areas. One of those is Mass Customisation a which was the focus of my original Threadless dissertation.
There is an excellent post on madeforone.com which summarises up the whole concept (!warning long alert!), charts its history, and attempts to tie together all the associated terms like peer production, consumer innovation, open innovation, lead users. Basically, its an excellent introduction to the whole area.