Chapter 13: Strategic Entrepreneurship 425
Strategic Focus
Innovation Can Be QuirkyQuirky is a unique new venture founded in 2009 that combines
the opportunities provided by the Internet of everything with
the more physical world of business (e.g., industrial design,
manufacturing, and marketing) to produce innovations. Some
have referred to the company as an innovation machine—the
mission is to commercialize new product ideas. Ben Kaufman,
founder and CEO of the company, suggests that the goal is
“to create an engine that accelerates the process of identifying
and developing ideas for all kinds of products.”
Quirky has built a social network of inventors and others,
some of whom submit ideas for new products, who are used
to evaluate new product ideas (for marketability and manu-
facturing feasibility). The approximately one million people
involved in this network also offer ideas on how to refine and
improve the product ideas. Quirky receives around 4,000 prod-
uct ideas each week and brought 400 Quirky-generated prod-
ucts to the market by 2015. It has received funding from some
large venture capital firms and by one major corporate partner,
GE (invested $30 million).
After a product idea is evaluated, refined, and sometimes
improved, Quirky uses large 3-D printers to create prototypes.
The firm also begins searching for a manufacturer and simul-
taneously seeking a market for the products through retailers
(such as Home Depot, Target, Walmart, etc.). Given the promise
of this company to commercialize inventions (create innova-
tion), it raised $185 million in venture capital and grew to
300 employees, opening new offices in California to comple-
ment its New York headquarters.
Although there was much excitement, Quirky experienced
problems. Some of its products failed to achieve a following
in the marketplace (the social network evaluations were not
adequate for marketing research), and other products had
quality problems (due to inadequate quality control). Quirky
tried to move products to the market too quickly. As a result
it lost $120 million dollars and had to reduce operations to
avoid having a cash shortage. As such, Quirky laid off about 20percent of its staff and made some other changes to focus its
activities.
Quirky decided to focus its efforts to sign up more corpo-
rate partners in addition to GE. It is trying to focus more of its
efforts on products for the smart home, products that com-
municate with a smartphone or home Wi-Fi network. Quirky’s
Wink smartphone and tablet app provides a digital dashboard
to link and control smart-home devices (e.g., lights, lawn sprin-
klers, garage doors, air conditioning, etc.). Quirky now has
15 companies that will offer about 60 Wink-enabled products.
Among them are GE, Honeywell, and Philips. The products are
sold under the company’s own brand but will carry a tagline:
“Powered by Quirky.”Sources: S. Lohr, 2014, Quirky to create a smart-home products company, New York
Times, http://www.nytimes.com, June 22; G. Karol, 2014, NYC startup Quirky launches
platform for Internet of things, FOXBusiness, http://www.foxbusiness.com, June 24;
M. Baratz, 2014, Counting down with...Ben Kaufman, Fortune, fortune.com, July 21;
S. Lohr, 2015, The invention mob, brought to you by Quirky, New York Times, http://www.
nytimes.com, February 14; B. Popper, 2015, How the invention factory at Quirky
almost imagined its way out of business, The Verge, http://www.theverge.com, April 24;
J. D’Onfro, 2015, How a Quirky 28-year-old plowed through $15 million and almost
destroyed his startup, Business Insider, http://www.businessinsider.com, April 29.Courtesy of Innovation excellence
Innovative products developed by Quirky
through its partnership with GE.The example of Quirky in the Strategic Focus demonstrates the creative potential of
innovation and simultaneously the risk and uncertainty involved in creating and trying
to commercialize inventions (particularly novel ones). Quirky is a unique and potentially
valuable company that takes new product ideas offered by inventors and evaluates them.
For the ones deemed to have potential value, Quirky then develops prototypes, finds a