Quirky (company)

High school (ages 12+)
Making & Design

Name:

Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/quirky-company

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. What is the founding year?2009
2. What is the founding location?New York City
3. What is Quirky?Quirky was a website that let people share their fun ideas and work together to turn them into real products. It helped inventors talk to designers, makers, and sellers all online.
4. How did Quirky help inventors make their ideas real?Inventors posted sketches or descriptions on Quirky. Other users commented, improved, and voted on the ideas. The best ideas were then built and sold by Quirky.

Invention Ecosystem: A network of individuals, organizations, and resources that support the creation and development of new ideas and products.
Democratize Invention: To make the process of inventing and bringing products to market accessible to a wider population.
Crowdsourcing: The practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, especially from an online community.
Open Innovation: A paradigm that assumes firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology.