What are the similarities and differences between a community-driven product development process and a traditional product development process within a firm?

Differences:

·         Community-driven product developers can get immediate consumer feedback and suggestions.

·         Community-driven product developers can generally release prototypes and ideas to a larger audience—and to an audience that feels connected and invested in the company and is more likely to offer constructive feedback because of that tie.

·         The free-flow of ideas generated through crowd-sourcing sites such as Threadless enables the community to brainstorm and generate ideas greater than any single person would have or that a team would have developed in a longer amount of time.

·         Traditional product development can include in-depth, closely monitored phases of brainstorming, market analysis, market testing, and modifications while a community driven process simply requires the introduction of an idea and analyzing feedback. This effort can take a lot of time and money and success depends on the method of audience selection.

Similarities:

·         Both have a lot of considerations in potentially alienating consumers when changing the product or some aspect of the business.

·         Both processes have testing stages in order to figure out which products will sell.

·         Both processes base modifications and development off of consumer feedback.