Crowdsourcing Ideas
I have just come across Halfbakery, a social ideas site. It is essentially an idea bank, where users submit various ideas they have for anything…products, services, even social conventions. Other users then comment on and vote on the ideas. How many times has a quick idea for “the next big thing” or an improvement on a current thing popped into your head? With sites like Halfbakery you can now share these ideas with others instead of letting them die out. What’s most interesting is that Halfbakery seems like a very cutting-edge,Web 2.0-ish site. And yet, it has been around since 2000, years before user-generated content became such a big deal. In its current state, Halfbakery looks like not much more than a toy, especially since most of the ideas are a little…silly(Neckties that smell like fish,anyone?). But the concept of ideas coming from the general public is both simple and brilliant, and one any corporation can apply. Imagine if McDonalds, or any other corporation that feigns concern for public feedback would drop those annoying feedback forms that will be forwarded to our upper management and we will read them very carefully and also we value your feedback very much becasue you are so so important to us and thank you for your feedback so much kthnxbai, and instead switched to a more…social model. What if McDonalds had a feedback site like Halfbakery, where all submitted feedback would be out in the open, visible by all, with others voting for and commenting on the best suggestions. At the end of the month, in a show of good faith, the company could take steps to implement some suggestions they like. This is a win-win… consumers know that their voices are being heard, and marketers gets loads of invaluable market data for free. Crowdsourcing at its finest. Unfortunately, buzzwords aside, most companies are still stuck in Web 1.0- one-way communications. It will take a very big push indeed for big corporations to open such a dialogue with customers.
Note: Gripefruit is doing something similar, with customers posting complaints and voting on them. However, without an avenue for constructive criticism, and without direct access to those who can do something about those complaints, the site will never take off.
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I love finding sites like these, that were doing “the next big thing” years before anybody was talking about it.
The company I work for, Cambrian House, does something similar with our IdeaWarz tournament, but we throw in $10,000 to help the winner bring their idea to fruition. We also offer a crowdsourcing platform for any would-be entrepreneur to leap in and pull together a team.
Our blog serves up commentary and advice on crowdsourcing and entrepreneurship, but your comment about companies being invested in unilateral communications has got me thinking about ways to pull our community into the conversation. Thank you.
Ilya -
There are many valid reasons why large companies - particularly publicly traded companies - would never buy into this approach, controlling public image being just one. Could they improve how they communicate with customers and stakeholders? Absolutely. But it’s unlikely that they would ever let the public peek up their skirts in unison only to discover how dirty their knickers might be afterall.
I was about to pimp Cambrian House but Nox beat me too it.
They’re good people, even gave me an Xbox 360.
Wow… I had not heard of Cambrian House, but I like it! Keep up the great work. This is how MyDreamApp should have worked.
[…] Gefunden bei Neomeme […]
Web 2.0-ish? Oh, you’re too kind.
Amusingly, the “Neckties that smell like fish” idea that struct you as an example of Halfbakery’s silly spirit was conceived and executed by people from another, unrelated, Internet forum who were trying to subvert the oh-so-serious Halfbakery by faking group approval for a pre-agreed, obviously nonsensical, idea. The “invading” group would identify each other by including a country reference in their annotations. Halfbakers then traced them back to *their* website, read their instructions, and joined in their game, causing one of the halfbakers to be mistaken for a renegade member of the invading group. Good times.
For a genuinely homegrown example of halfbaked ingenuity, I sometimes use “Pizza Satellite” - it bakes during reentry!
For about 20 or so other “post your own idea” sites, all with slightly different flavours, see the halfbakery “links” section. Many existed before the halfbakery, and I’m a little heartbroken to see that some aren’t outlasting us - especially shouldexist.org, which I was about to cite as an example of a more mission-oriented site.
Thanks for the backstory, Jutta. Halfbakery has quickly become on of my favorite websites, if only for the constant flow of so-crazy-it-might-just work ideas.
[…] Secretly Reads My Blog Posted February 16, 2007 Not long ago, I blogged about my proposal for large corporations to quickly gather feedback from large groups of users and at the same time […]
good article.