Quirky founder and CEO Ben Kaufman

Quirky is built on a democratic, partly crowdsourced business model. Anyone can submit a product idea to Quirky's Web site. Quirky's online community then refines the idea by making suggestions. As products rise in popularity on the site via a voting system, Quirky's own team of professional designers and engineers also votes twice a week to select the most popular ideas to turn into real consumer products. The original inventor, the relevant commenters, and Quirky itself all share in the profits once each product comes to market.