Grab More Market Share: How to Wrangle Business Away from Lazy Competitors

Dream This!

When it finally welcomes its first commercial passengers on board, the 787 Dreamliner jet will be the undisputed success story of the Boeing fleet. But even Boeing didn't presume that it could build the Dreamliner without help. According to company spokesperson Loretta Gunter, “It would be arrogant to think that all of the best ideas and best technologies exist within the walls of Boeing.”

Upon thinking it through, Boeing enlisted the crowd and organized a mass collaboration effort from brands such as Honeywell, Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, General Electric, and 96 of its other suppliers. During the exhaustive design process, engineers from 100 such companies used sophisticated database software. They traded plans, chatted online, accessed each other's designs, and conducted simulations in real time to make sure that no incompatibility problems would surface later.

Keep in mind that many of these companies were intense competitors of Boeing. It would seem that there would be a huge risk that one or more of the companies might restrain themselves from giving up their best stuff. However, Boeing made it clear that if too much innovation were kept under wraps, the consequences would be brutal for the rest of the team.

Did accessing the crowd work? It sure did. Boeing was able to cut a year off the design process, and the 787 Dreamliner has been the fastest-selling airplane in the company's history. So far, Boeing has 843 net orders at $150 million each—not a bad outcome.