By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter
Early last year, Samsung Electronics was supposed to release the Haptic touch-screen mobile phone that eventually became a mega hit on the domestic market.
However, the world's second-largest handset producer postponed its debut by one month at the request of test users who asked for a change in its design.
Originally, Samsung planned to release the touch-sensitive model without any buttons but it changed the policy to feature a pair of hot keys for activating and terminating calls, as recommended.
Samsung has sold up to 700,000 units of the compelling gizmo with the changed user interface thus far and 1.15 million of its three sequels.
According to the Samsung Economic Research Institute (SERI), a private think-tank and subsidiary of Samsung Group, Thursday, this is an outstanding example of employing collective intelligence to rack up a success in the competitive market.
``Samsung Electronics put off the launch of Haptic phone while scrapping thousands of gadgets already manufactured without any hot keys,'' SERI researcher Hong Sun-young said.
``Yet, such measures did more good than harm to Samsung as it led to the birth of the million-seller Haptic brand. This is a standard case that shows how collective intelligence works in business,'' she said.
Hong said this has prevailed throughout history in the creation of the most innovative products such as the light bulb or airplane, against conventional wisdom.
``Most think that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb and Wright Brothers created the airplane. But it took the collaboration of numerous people behind the scenes to come up with such great inventions,'' Hong said.
``Collective intelligence has always outsmarted the sophistication of a handful of geniuses. Corporations need to take advantage of this to make money,'' she said.
As examples of harnessing collective intelligence in business, Hong named open standard research projects such as Connect & Development of P&G and Ideastorm of Dell Computer as well as Haptic.
``Companies need to leverage opinions from outside resources from planning any goods or services to designing and marketing them,'' Hong said.
``Collective intelligence will provide a competitive edge to entities in comparison to those which restrict their approach to only in-house resources,'' she said.