One of the hypotheses for my research this year is that while many companies have starting jumping on the “prosumer bandwagon” (getting customers actively involved in the innovation around, and the communication of, the goods and services they consume), the “contribute your ideas to us for free” approach is going to be replaced with a model that shares rewards. I wrote about one example of this back in October – Brownbook, that was trialing an innovative model that rewarded top prosumers with 20% of the lifetime value of the customer. While I continue to think this is a very interesting start-up to watch, for people that are more interested in what “established” companies are doing in this space, the Globe & Mail has a very interesting story today about a new customer (or prosumer) driven campaign that follows a similar principle.

I won’t bother re-telling the whole story about how Frito is “literally handing over the brand to the consumer”, but rather acutely focus on the incentive model. The winner of their contest to promote the new product will take home $25,000, and more importantly 1% of sales into perpetuity.

I love this. As I’ve noted before, almost every wikinomics example that came out of the original research was tied to one of two extremes – either asking customers to get engaged “for free”, or a simple contest model (like the $25,000 prize). This next step towards rewarding top prosumers with a share of lifetime income/ sales could, in my opinion, unleash an extraordinary wave of creativity and innovation over the coming years… and yes, I think I may just spend the weekend trying to see if I can come up with something for them.