Welcome to Joshua-Michele Ross, who joins the Radar team with a focus on how Web 2.0 is affecting business strategy – Sara Winge
Best Buy is a pioneer when it comes to unleashing the talent of their own staff; from the Loop Marketplace that allows employees to submit ideas for Digg-style ranking AND funding across divisions (for example an HR manager can fund an idea from a customer service employee) to their use of prediction markets and their support of the employee-driven social network, Blue Shirt Nation.
Now they are hoping to tap into the developer talent pool with remix.bestbuy.com which they announced at the recent NYC Web 2.0 Expo. According to project lead, Dave Micko, Remix is “an open API to access all of the data that feeds www.bestbuy.com. So, all of the rich information featured on Best Buy’s extensive, deep and content rich web site will now be available publicly via a simple, REST-based API call. “
While other big box stores are thinking small and releasing unappetizing Facebook widgets like this:
Best Buy is thinking much more strategically about the value of the Internet by allowing anyone to reinvent their entire online store. With “access to all the data that feeds Bestbuy.com” imagine the potential of creating your own, curated site on top of Best Buy’s catalog and supply chain. Imagine top Blue Shirts running their own online stores with select merchandise that they stand behind or imagine a thousand home-theater geeks and “go-to-guys” (and girls) extending their expertise and word-of-mouth via their own online stores.
Much needed breakthroughs in ecommerce usability (product and catalog navigation, visualization, design and findability) are now open to thousands of developers to work on. Best Buy will be able to bring that intelligence back into their organization. The only missing piece seems to be some form of compensation for folks who actually go to the trouble of creating their own stores; reward zone points, commission, reputation etc.
Open beats Closed:
This move reflects one of the new strategic principles at work on the Internet: Open beats Closed. There are two readings of open beats closed – both correct and on-point for Best Buy. First, it is the literal injunction to be consistent with the norms of behavior on the Social Web; authentic, transparent and candid. Second, businesses are finding new ways of sourcing content, innovation and market insight and energy outside of their organization. They are letting more people to contribute by allowing access to once tightly guarded data or business processes (via APIs and mashups). As a result they are redrawing the boundaries of the traditional organization. As we dig deeper into the network economy closed companies are going to find it more and more difficult to survive against open companies.
Has anyone in the Radar community seen a similar, open move by a big, traditional company? I have not.
(In full disclosure: I have worked with Best Buy on several initiatives but have nothing to do with the remix project.)