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…

Share This

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting with Jake Nickell of Threadless “on location” in Chicago. It was awesome to get a glance of the company backstage and to check-out some of the new stuff they’re working on.

To the few people who don’t know what “Threadless” is all about here’s a quick introduction:

Threadless is a business which to an extreme degree is based on user-driven innovation or “crowdsourcing” - as many call it today. They use these techniques to make and sell T-shirts. Anyone can submit a design, then users get to vote on their favorites. The T-shirts that get the most votes are produced and sold online. Four to six designs are chosen every week from 600+ submissions to be printed and sold from the site with the winning designers receiving $2,000 in cash and prizes.

They’re doing a great job: Came up with a great - yet fairly simple - idea (which many people do!) but more importantly they executed this idea with so much energy and so much skill (which very few people do!) that “idea” quickly grew from a very small to be a million $ business. Well done.

I hope to convince Jake to do some projects together … that would be fun.
——————

This guy Frank Piller dissected a New York Times article on Threadless and found out that:

2000: Year of founding Threadless.

125: Number of submissions received by Threadless each day.

“Millions”: Dollars earned by selling T-shirts” not by hiring star designers but by asking anybody to design them.

Hundreds of thousands: Number of user voting each day.

6: Number of new T-shirt offerings per week.

1,500: Typical size of a batch of each new design.

2,000: Dollars paid to winning designers.

“Almost everything”: Number of items that sell out.

1: Number of Threadless stores, the first opened in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago in July 2007.

2.6 or higher: Score of most winning designs (on the rating scale from 0 to 5).

2.0: Lowest rank of a winning design.

x*n/z: “The final decision about which T’s actually get made and sold has always involved a bit of nonpublic number crunching. For example, Threadless looks at how many 0s and 5s a design gets; designs that inspire passionate disagreement often get printed because they tend to sell”.

1: There is a surprising degree of consistency — maybe even similarity — in the designs. “It’s a barometer of what’s going on in art and design right now,” Threadless director Kalmikoff suggests.

17: Number of winning designs submitted by Glenn Jones, a New Zealand designer.

Share This

Timing is everything.
About 10 hours after my post on “John Ziitrain and broken platforms” e.g. iTunes and the iPhone from Apple this press release is delivered to my inbox:

WWDC 2007, SAN FRANCISCO—June 11, 2007—Apple® today announced that its revolutionary iPhone™ will run applications created with Web 2.0 Internet standards when it begins shipping on June 29. Developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone’s services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps. Third-party applications created using Web 2.0 standards can extend iPhone’s capabilities without compromising its reliability or security.

“Developers and users alike are going to be very surprised and pleased at how great these applications look and work on iPhone,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Our innovative approach, using Web 2.0-based standards, lets developers create amazing new applications while keeping the iPhone secure and reliable.”

Web 2.0-based applications are being embraced by leading developers because they are far more interactive and responsive than traditional web applications, and can be easily distributed over the Internet and painlessly updated by simply changing the code on the developers’ own servers. The modern web standards also provide secure data access and transactions, like those used with Amazon.com or online banking.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and will enter the mobile phone market this year with its revolutionary iPhone.

Share This

I just had the pleasure of a 3 hour long chat with Martin von Haller Groenbaek who’s a partner at Copenhagen-based Bender von Haller Dragsted - a leading Scandinavian IT-law boutique. Martin specializes in legal issues related to emerging technology and business models based on openness. Need advice on e.g. issues like Creative Commons? Give the man a call.

It certainly was a great chance for me to dig a little deeper into the whole aspect of open business models as well as open source technology - something that seems to play an increasingly important role in many of my companies and in some of the projects currently in the pipeline.

Why is openness important to an ordinary small tech start-up? What exactly does “openness” mean?

I still don’t have all the answers clearly defined and I guess that’s partly why I’m talking to Martin, reading Chesbrough’s Open Business Models, booked a meeting up with the successful Danish open source entrepreneur Niels Hartvig, following SaaS vendor sugarCRM so closely, asking silly questions on Linkedin, flicking through the pages of Wikinomics, and going to listen to Jimmy Wales in Chicago a few weeks from now.

Hopefully it all helps me understand the concept of openness a lot better… Because right now I’m a little lost.

Share This