eclining or stagnant membership..Mature products and services delivering less to the bottom line..

Harder to attract and keep volunteer leaders..Costly delivery of products and services..Ever increasing direct and indirect competition.. You may be familiar with these signs. They occur more often among associations t oday than ever and we can expect only more of the same. Unless we recognize what is causing this deterioration and adapt new methods to create essential value and share it. By essential value I mean something of value your members or customers feel they c ant do without. Or to put it another way, delivering a product or service that an swers the question you put to your customer.what keeps you up at night? Increasingly, the old methods of measuring a moment in time of customer or membe r need, expectation or desired outcome via surveys, focus groups, etc are not ca pable on their own to develop essential product and service experiences. Such in telligence gathering is too slow, too removed, too often misinterpreted, and too old to be useful in the design and delivery of products and services in a real t ime, customized world. As we saw in Case 4 Change end users of products and services are increasingly m ore demanding not only in the end products ability to deliver value, but also in how the production process engage them across the entire spectrum of product and service development. Todays leading innovators from global companies like toymaker Lego to small Canad ian software product outfits like Cambrian House (above), are leveraging the mag ic of peer production (volunteer contributed content) and crowdsourcing (paid contri butor content) to create massively distributed idea, design, production and mark eting factories for the global knowledge economy. We are witnessing the evolution of a new means of production from the previous c enturys command and control structure to a more networked system where people out side the organization can contribute valuable intellectual capacity with interna l employees. They collaborate together to create essential value that becomes cu stomized products or services which in turn they buy and evangelize with unprece dented vigor. Here is a fun overview of the value proposition and investor video pitch of just such a enterprise. In this section we profile organizations who are reshaping how mass customized p roducts and services are being created and delivered to market using peer produc tion and crowdsourcing. Just some of the players well learn about include: Cambrian House an exciting new company from Canada where the entire product deve lopment process from Ideation, Business Case, Design & Production, Distribution, and Marketing is driven by crowdsourcing CrowdSpirit - use crowds to develop and bring to market tangible, inexpensive, e lectronic devices such as CD players, joysticks for video games, and Web cams Gannett YES That Gannett the news organization has plans to change its newsroom to take advantage of peer production, putting readers to work as watchdogs, whis tle-blowers, and investigators If you have other favorites maybe even your own organization, share them here.