While in our earlier post, we talked about Lisa Armstrong's article about every product needing a designer's name behind it, according to a recent survey, this trend will not be long for this world. The Economist Intelligence Unit, which has an extremely menacing, scary-sounding name (even though it's just a part of The Economist, the only-slightly-scary magazine), has just released said report, wherein they interviewed a whole slew of executives about how products would be designed and where the ideas would come from and a whole third of them said they figured, by 2013, most the good ideas they'd jump on wouldn't be from internal employees, but from customers and regular people (who, we're assuming, they'd pay a bunch of money to buy the idea from -- so sort of like today, only they'd be buying stuff from people, not just snapping up internet startups). Primarily we find it pretty interesting that this is about product design, given the difficulties behind building models and plastic molds. But hey, it's a report on guessing about the future, so checking off a box to say "I believe this could be possible" doesn't really have to be such a big, heart wrenching decision. Still pretty interesting to think about though.