Chris Grams

1699 points

Raleigh, NC

Chris Grams is the Head of Marketing at Tidelift and author of The Ad-Free Brand: Secrets to Building Successful Brands in a Digital World.

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Email: chris(at)tidelift.com

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Authored Content

Avoid the tool trap when building communities

Over the last few years, I've had the opportunity to work with many different organizations attempting to build successful communities inside and outside the open source world…

Two different business organization charts

BetterMeans: a new app for running your organization the open source way

Last week I received a heads up about a new web application launching today from a company called BetterMeans with an impressive goal: to build the infrastructure (processes…

Open innovation and open source innovation: what do they share and where do they differ?

Recently, Stefan Lindegaard, open innovation expert and author of the new book The Open Innovation Revolution , joined opensource.com for a webcast about open innovation…

Apple, Google, and the open vs. closed positioning war

Over the last few months, the battle to define the meaning of the word "open" has intensified into one of the more interesting brand positioning exercises I've seen in the…

A community-building perspective on the Gap logo controversy

Over the last week, a handful of folks have reached out and asked me what I think about the events surrounding the launch, then crowdsourcing, then full repeal of the new Gap…

Five questions about open innovation, open source, and NASA with Molly Dix of RTI

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet Molly Dix and Jeff Cope, who run the Open Innovation Advisory Services group at RTI. For those not familiar with RTI, it is one…

Authored Comments

cgrams

17 Feb 2011

User-led innovation can't create breakthroughs. Really?

Thanks for the thoughtful comments, folks! I do still feel like the original article was a bit over the top on purpose in order to get a reaction, making a bold claim so people would think a bit more.

But one additional thing struck me this morning. The article says IKEA doesn't employ user studies or user insights because they tried it previously and it doesn't work.

But as I've been waiting two weeks for the last missing part to arrive so I can finish up my IKEA kitchen, I'm actually wishing IKEA would take some of MY user insights into account right about now... from my personal experience, a little user-led innovation might do them some good!

Thanks again for weighing in!

cgrams

10 Feb 2011

Four ways to undermine a community

Hi Paul-- there are some really great insights in your comment above. In fact, I wonder if you might take some of these thoughts and turn them into an article about "dealing with bad actors in a community."

Or maybe the biz channel moderator should just post your re-post your comment as a new article so more people will see it:)