Idea ecologies, the new frontier of innovation?
Idea ecologies, the new frontier of innovation?

Idea ecologies, the new frontier of innovation?

Idea ecologies are exploding by using open innovation based principles. Until recently it was very difficult to tell your suppliers (the many retail and other suppliers that fill our everyday life with goods and services) what you need from them. Now with crowdsourcing and idea ecologies you can become part of these organizations and participate in swarm based innovation behaviour. In my previous post about these ecologies I discussed some examples. This is an update with more organizations joining the “crowdsourcing of ideas” phenomena.

eBay, Amazon and others pioneered and popularized the concept of rating and reviewing of deals in the world of commerce. In this digital world we trade with ideas and intellectual assets.

UbuntuCheck the Ubuntu community’s ability to elicit ideas and have the best ones implemented by an open source community.

Innocentive is one of the first successful idea ecologies that was founded by Eli Lily. Ideas are captured and solved by the crowds of people interested in making an impact. Communities are brought together to solve problems and prizes are set in monetary and other soft measures.

Idea BountyIdea Bounty is a community that elicits ideas and then crowdsource the best ideas as a solution to the problem (ideas). A bounty is set where the prize money is promoted as one of the biggest draw cards of the crowd. In this community you have creatives and clients. Clients set bounties and creatives respond to these with great and useful ideas. You can also be rewarded if your friends have winning ideas; they call it “Share the Love”. I like this statement; “Idea Bounty was started by a guy who saw the light and a guy who was frantically waving a torch.”.

idea connectionIdea Connection is a great community with lots of information on the concept of crowdsourcing. With the vision statement: “To give businesses access to the world’s most creative and innovative minds, who work collaboratively to solve problems and develop innovations.” they have a mountain to climb as the world is jumping on the ecology wave. They follow the same approach; ideas are needed to solve problems, ideas are captured and rewarded.

header_netflixNetflix Prize wants to achieve: “The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences.” In the world of media and especially in a disruptive world of on-line media, the viewer uses ratings extensively. This community tries to incentivise crowd participation for rewards.

IdeanetIDEAnet has a noble cause. This is their purpose: “The IDEAnet is a global collaboration of individuals and institutions that provide medical services and humanitarian relief. The mission of IDEAnet is to foster collaborative efforts to use distributed learning and volunteer telemedicine to address health disparities and foster effective, sustainable health services.” It is mostly designed around Communities of Practice based concepts where ideas and discussed and developed for benefit to the community.

P&GConnect + Develop from P&G is a great open based innovation community that brings together many parties in making innovation work. This is a comment from Bruce Brown: “It’s our version of open innovation: the practice of accessing externally developed intellectual property in your own business and allowing your internally developed assets and know-how to be used by others.” This is a great summary of many parts of the crowdsourcing based innovation concepts: “Today, open innovation at P&G works both ways — inbound and outbound — and encompasses everything from trademarks to packaging, marketing models to engineering, and business services to design. It’s so much more than technology.” P&G has Innocentive, NineSigma, Yet2, and yourEncore as partners making their innovation initiatives some of the most successful today.

SocialtextSocialtext is a social community platform where many components of what’s needed to construct complete collaboration communities are built. Their value statement: “Socialtext was founded on the vision that technologies emerging in the consumer web offered far better social dynamics than any enterprise software. The opportunity we saw was to create a new social context for organizations and the people who make up those organizations.”

Social computing as a platform for social networks are now in the corporate space. For those that believe that the old paradigm, and those set in their ways, is going to get you to compete with the highly integrated and well connected generation has some else coming. This is the era of social based ecological activity. Consumers are educated that their voices will be heard and that the eras gone by, where CRM and other half-baked attempts to solving customer problems, are gone. There is an explosion of social communities, check these entries; 50 Niche Social Media Communities and top social networks for entrepreneurs. And, yet senior people shun social networks. We are in a paradigm of socialization.