GE & Quirky: Why The Best Ideas Come From The Living Room

Linda Boff, Executive Director of GE‘s global brand marketing and Doreen Lorenzo, President of Quirky, teamed up at PSFK Conference 2014 to talk about the new partnership between the two companies and what they've been able to achieve in the past year.

Since Quirky & GE have partnered they have created four new products in the span of four months. Boff said GE's partnership with the much smaller Quirky has allowed them to take action on projects that have languished on the drawing board for months.

It helps that the two companies are aligned to the core. “When we met Quirky, we really thought that we had found a company that was built on the same kind of DNA,” Boff says.

Boff and other GE employees were impressed by Quirky’s willingness to collaborate with Quirky allows consumers to go online to submit an idea, and members of the site vote on which one they would like to see become reality.

“The best ideas don’t come from the boardroom, but from the living room” Boff says. “We want to give everybody access to that.”

When inventor Garthen Leslie submitted his idea for Aros, an air conditioner that allows homeowners to control from their phone, he received rapid approval and funding from Quirky contributors. GE then got to work on the product, which is available now for sale.

“For us to imagine at GE that we had a product in mind and that in four months it would be on a boat, on it’s way, it’s unheralded,” Boff says.

Quirky // @doreenl

GE // @lindaboff

PSFK CONFERENCE 2014

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