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Garthen Leslie is an IT consultant and looks the part. He's geeky, quiet, and middle-aged, sporting a long, untucked white polo, khakis, and wire-framed glasses. But today, very suddenly, he is also the face of a new ideal--a symbol of how invention itself is being reinvented.
"It was August and really hot," Leslie says, recalling how it all began, as he reaches for an hors d'oeuvre at a media-saturated party being thrown in his honor in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood (Martha Stewart will amble through the door in about 15 minutes). The 63-year-old had been commuting from Washington, D.C., to suburban Maryland, dreading the hellishly stuffy home that awaited him--but he didn't want to leave his AC on all day, for fear of an equally hellish energy bill. "I thought, There are all kinds of applications forsmartphones," he says. "Why couldn't we marry one to these window air conditioners?" He dreamt up a device that did just that and submitted it to a New York startup called Quirky,
which turns great ideas into best-selling products...
Great things have come from Quirky and its community of inventors. But their biggest project, Aros, strained everyone. fast Company looks inside the crowdsourcing phenomena.