Using the crowd to bring in knowledge on current trends and future developments is nothing new anymore. In an earlier post i wrote about how companies can learn from customers and in another also about IBM using its employees (and some customers) to get ideas for new innovations in their global innovation jam.

Today i came across another example: Philips with their recently launched livesimplicity.net. Philips is a dutch company, offering technology products for lifestyle and healthcare sectors and is already known from its Lead Users program. On Leadusers.nl (dutch website) they conducted studies with lead users on specific topics, like video technology and sleep quality.

To me it seems that they have used the leadusers.nl website not only to gain knowledge on those topics, but also on how to listen to consumers. This knowledge clearly is now used in their livesimplicity initiative. The initiative is a mix between a weblog and a discussion forum, and has a lot of similarities with the InnovationJam website of IBM.

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