Innovation … One Platform, Many Minds
November 7th, 2007
Just learned about this cool place called InnoCentive - an online community designed to help corporate and nonprofit clients solve research-and-development problems by posting descriptions of these problems, called challenges, on a website visited by thousands of researchers, scientists, engineers, and mathematicians from around the world; those who solve a problem can qualify for financial awards.
Anyone tried it? Is it good? Suitable for big or small companies?
Well, one of the reasons why InnoCentive is particular interesting to me is that I’ve been struggling some time now trying to figure out how a decent innovation ecosystem could look like (e.g. for TraceWorks). I’ve been asking questions like:
- What is the distinction between e.g. “mundane changes”, “innovative changes”, and “inventions”?
- What would be an effective incentive to motivate active involvement?
- How open should innovation be e.g. only internal or also include the outside world? And to what degree?
- How to control innovation in certain directions? And is control necessary at all (or even counter productive)?
I think it would be a lot of fun to knit together a simple yet powerful web app to help small and medium sized companies streamline innovation - or probably in many cases introduce “innovation” as concrete individual process for the first time.
I don’t want it to be a big market place like InnoCentive. I want it to be a small web based tool where employees, customers, selected experts and ambassadors can openly suggest, request, and collaborate in pushing a given company forward … and I think “SHIFT” could be a pretty cool name for such a web app.
Stay tuned. SHIFT might happen…
January 10th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Hi,
I like very much sellaband.com. Something similar would be great. But in sellabnd.com 99% of the product is made before asking for money.
I propose
1. to reemplace the songs by a small questionaire and a small bio.
2. the project should partner with VC and business angel so people can also post from their websites.
3. only employees from the VC and employees from their portofolio companies can review and invest.
4.VC companies give 1.000.000 points yearly to each employee of their network.
5. Listing is free.
Advantages for VC and business angels.
1. More project can be reviewed by more people in an earlier phase.
2. Identifuing potential good investors (the secretary?).
3. People can fail as it’s not real money.
4. Benchmark against other similar
companies.
Advantages for people with ideas.
1. Good feedback from trusted source.
2. Get fiance from friends if they decide to go for real money.
January 10th, 2008 at 11:34 am
sorry I deleted it.
To launch the process the site could start with some data from killerstartup.com or simplespark.com.
Obvioulsy the site is clean, with nice and simple graphic like a real stock exchange.The best investors explaining why they think it’s gonna be a great think.
The second phase could be the reverse. Given an amount of money and time frame what would be the best solution to develop.
The concept is not new, neither extraordinary. But I think that all these people working in the VC companies and VC-funded comapanies would love a little bit more exposure and extra success to add to their curriculum.
And some of them, as technorati, have to be good.
So when do we start?
January 19th, 2008 at 8:44 am
@Khalil
Drop me an email (mewulff@gmail.com) … the idea (again), the business model, resources needed, and a brief bio on you. Thanks.