Quirky is a company that collects ideas on innovative products from it’s “community members.” It is governed somewhere between crowdsourcing and a holacracy (see the posts on Zappos and Valve). They have formed an alliance with the much more established and traditional, General Electric (GE). The two companies have very different strengths which can be the basis of complementarities that drive value creation in alliances. Together, they have produced Aros, a connected air conditioner that, for example, uses one’s Phone location to tell the system when to turn on and cool one’s house. This is a nice opportunity to apply the frameworks for achieving a network advantage (see Greve, Rowley, & Shipilov’s new book). For example, Shipilov describes the Alliance Radar framework which allows you to see if an alliance portfolio is balanced and identify what kinds of alliances will create the most value. Below is a video review of the resulting product. See also Henrich Greve’s blog post on the alliance for a discussion of how it has worked. While GE handled the product design, manufacturing and sales, the core idea came from Quirky.

Contributed by Aya Chacar