Crowdfunding and Corporate Innovation — Precoil – DLIT

From what I can determine, FirstBuild is a solely owned subsidiary of GE Appliances. Most of the appliances I can think of from GE Appliances are generally large, so I can imagine it must’ve been a tough sell to pitch an ice maker that sits on your countertop to leadership.

In most companies, these conversations play out like this:

Employee: I think this is a great idea.

Manager: I think this is a bad idea.

The person with the higher rank wins.

But GE Appliances approached this differently. They spun up a microfactory called FirstBuild to help test some of these ideas, instead of killing them outright from the beginning. And here is where it gets really interesting, the team behind FirstBuild received permission to launch an external crowdfunding campaign. It’s not as if GE Appliances needed the money to fund this new product, but they raised over $2.7 million doing so.

That’s a pretty strong viability signal!

If you start to dig into the product detail page of Opal on the FirstBuild website, you’ll find hints that maybe they ran other types of experiments as well.

“The co-create community at FirstBuild has carefully designed the Opal with the enthusiast in mind: people who drop by their favorite restaurant on the weekend to pick up a bag of that special soft ice or have googled “nugget ice maker for home” only to find that home nugget ice makers start at $2000 – $3000. Opal is smart enough to know when to start and stop making ice so you’re never left without it. Just like in any cooler, ice will slowly melt within the air-insulated bucket, then turn on when it is time to refill.”

I can think of at least a few experiments based on that description alone. These could’ve easily been customer interviews and search trend analysis. Perhaps even a few boomerang experiments.

After this was quite successful, it wasn’t hard to bring the Opal ice maker on brand for GE Appliances.