By William C. Taylor　

　　For more than three decades, the designer John Fluevog has been selling colorful and distinctive shoes that win raves among rock stars and fashion models, have adorned an Absolut Vodka ad and attract legions of loyal customers that his company calls “Fluevogers.”

　　Over the last few years, though, Mr. Fluevog hasn’t just been presenting ideas about shoes and style to customers; he has also been soliciting ideas from them─encouraging brand enthusiasts to submit their own sketches for leather boots, high-heeled dress shoes, even sneakers with flair. He posts the submissions on his company’s website (fluevog.com/files—2/os-1.html), invites visitors to vote for their favorites and manufactures and sells the most promising designs. He calls it all “open source footwear.”

　　 “Customers want to express themselves, to be involved with the brand,” Mr. Fluevog said at the John Fluevog Shoes boutique on Newbury Street in Boston. (His company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, has shops in nine cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Melbourne, Australia.) “For so long, people would hand me a drawing of their personal design for a shoe or ask if I had considered an idea they liked. This program is a natural outgrowth of that desire for connection.”

　　To date, the company has chosen nearly 300 finalists from the flow of sketches into Vancouver─and introduced 10 shoes based on customer designs. On the day Mr. Fluevog visited Boston, the Newbury Street store was selling five of the most popular customer-inspired models, including the Urban Angel Traffic, a walking shoe (retail price, $179) designed by a customer in Moscow, and the Fellowship Hi Merrilee, a vintage-style pump ($189) designed by a customer in Provo, Utah.

　　 “Some of the ideas from customers are striking, but impossible to make,” Mr. Fluevog said. What tends to work best, he explained, are intriguing twists on design themes that he and his colleagues are already exploring. “But even submissions we can’t make add to the stimulation,” he added. “Our customers get more involved, and we get insights into who they are and what they are doing. It’s better for both of us.”

　　Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls this bottom-up phenomenon “lead-user innovation,” and has studied its effects in industries from extreme-sports gear to medical equipment.

　　In a time of ever more talented technology enthusiasts, hobbyists and do-it-yourselfers, all connected by Internet-enabled communication, he says, the most intensely engaged users of a product often find new ways to enhance it long before its manufacturer does. Thus, he argues, companies that aspire to stand out in fast-moving markets would be wise to invite their smartest users into the product design process.

　　 “It’s getting cheaper and cheaper for users to innovate on their own,” Professor von Hippel said. “This is not traditional market research─asking customers what they want. This is identifying what your most advanced users are already doing and understanding what their innovations mean for the future of your business.”

　　Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart, confounders of Threadless.com, based in Chicago, are developing an even more radical model of shared ownership with customers. Threadless, which has become something of an Internet sensation, is in a decidedly old-fashioned business: selling T-shirts. But the designs in its huge online catalog all come from the company’s customers, who submit their artwork to the site.

　　Visitors rate submissions on a one-to-five scale. The company selects five to seven designs a week and sells them for $15 apiece. Winners of the design competition receive $1,500 in cash and $500worth of merchandise. Other customers earn points─good for store credit─for referring new buyers and for submitting photos of themselves wearing Threadless shirts.

　　All of this online participation has built a group of deeply engaged users who design, select, market and buy products─an enterprise whose customers are, in effect, the company.

　　It’s a low-cost, high-involvement formula with plenty of room of growth. “Most of the energy comes from how fast the product line is changing,” Mr. Nickell said. “There’s something for users to do everyday─see which new designs are out, score the latest submissions, post a blog entry. It’s just a very active community.

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William C. Taylor is co-author of “Mavericks at Work,” to be published in October by William Morrow.