Fellowforce is a community platform / idea exchange for organizations and creative thinkers. The basic process works like this:
- Organizations can post challenges they’re facing in an effort to solicit innovative ideas and solutions, in exchange for a specified reward/prize.
- Community members can review available challenges and pitch their creative solutions to the problem.
- Organizations review the bidding ideas and select the best solution.
- Winning member receives the specified reward.
This all sounds very neat, but how are ideas protected? I guess there’s a certain degree of trust and perhaps the winner reveals more info after they’ve been selected.
Outsourced-innovation is a very hot-growing industry. Did you know BMW has its own outsourced design company? They’re called Designworks and have been around for at least 8 years.
More on this subject for another day…
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Have you seen any similar applications of idea-generation outsourcing? Social media and user communities have been used for product development and testing before. What are your thoughts on this? Do you see any pitfalls or concerns?
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InnoCentive is another very good one:
http://www.innocentive.com/
They pay scientists and researchers handsome cash for discovering value-adding solutions to specific problems.
The book “Wikinomics” discusses it in a little more detail. Pretty cool model with some rather impressive results.
Thank-you for the reference Ryan.
Truly some interesting times.