Business resources just became easier to find. “What citizen journalism and YouTube have done for media, CrowdSpirit hopes to do for product development,” according to this post on Springwise, a blog on future business ideas.

As the name suggests, CrowdSpirit is part of the crowdsourcing phenomenon, but it takes it into a new wave, where the ‘group think’ method is used to refine real world hardware products. Crowdspirt “aims to start a revolution in manufacturing by creating the first electronic products driven and inspired by customer’s wishes and expectations.”

This site encourages inventors to submit electronic product designs to the online CrowdSpirit community, who in open source fashion, refine the original products and vote on which ones should move forward. After being reviewed and financed by “community investors,” CrowdSpirit helps the product reach market and offers it to buyers, presumably the same people who helped define it in the first place.

This project, while promising, is still in the works. It is somewhat hazy how customer-manufacturers will get rewarded for their designs and efforts. At the moment contributors give up all intellectual property rights when they submit an idea or product, or when they help define a product. Although it may be a nice launching pad for young inventors, unless they have a line-up of products, they take their cut and surrender their innovative idea to the company.

“Whilst the inventor is clearly a significant individual in a project, it is the entire supply chain which works together and brings the product to market and we would look at the entire supply chain for a product (including the inventor) to see how the major contributors could be rewarded in terms of recognition,” said Craig Cockburn of CrowdSpirit.

CrowdSpirit is one of many projects harnessing the crowd and an open source model to produce real world products. The most successful to date is probably Threadless.com, a t-shirt design company that lets young artists “easily get their work out there for their peers to critique.” T-shirt designs are posted, voted on and receive feedback from the community – and every week a few winners get sent to print. The model, which gives both designer and Threadless get a cut of the action, has received plenty of attention, and rightfully so.

Open-source has now branched from software to journalism and now to product development. It is not simply a trend; it’s spreading out, seeping into any industry that has the imagination to incorporate it. I am waiting for the open-source job application.

Nichole Altmix works in the IT Department of a law firm as an applications trainer. She freelances for Block Magazine in Brooklyn and a Midwest publication, Marion Living.