Apr

24

Crowdsourcing Venture Capital Decisions…. sort of.

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Similar to product idea/product generation and promotion sites such as Kluster and Crowdspirit, You Be The VC and IdeaBlob aim to surface the best ideas for companies.  If your idea and pitch are good enough, you win prize money and support. (IdeaBlob gives out $10K a month for winning ideas while You Be The VC takes a different approach: they winnow ideas down internally then the public votes on the top 20 in order to award the top 3 with incubator-type services over the summer in Cambridge.)

Ideablob appears to be a marketing vehicle for Advanta, a large credit card company, which makes a certain amount of sense. It costs them $120K a year for the prize money and whatever it costs them to run and promote the site, which can only help them in marketing to the small businesses at the core of their target market.  It would be interesting to see what comes of the contest winners 6 months, a year after winning. There is nothing revolutionary here, it is basically a monthly contest the with the small twist of allowing people to vote.

You Be The VC on the other hand is a bit more interesting in that there is some follow up and responsibility there: winners aren’t just released into the wild with $10K to spend on their business, they need to go to Cambridge for 3 months and are provided with office space, advisors (such as Curt Shilling, yup, the Red Sox pitcher, huh?) and other admin/legal support services — not prize money.  It is run by Bang Ventures which is a legitimate investment company with some heavy hitter advisors.

The question remains: does the crowd voting in these cases add any value to the process or is it more of a gimic than anything else?  Any VC will tell you, they would rather go with a mediocre idea/great team than a great idea/mediocre team while the people voting are likely not that worried about the team, just the pizzaz of the idea. Although Bang Ventures is not a VC and don’t award money, they are investing time and resources in these companies.

As these types of sites proliferate it will become harder and harder to bring people into the process and get their feedback.  Threadless works so spectacularly due to their being pretty much first and best in the space as well as the simplicity of the feedback they are looking for.  You can look at a graphic design and make a quick decision… a business idea on the other hand?  A bit more complex.

Only the sites that are extremely compelling will survive.

Further, the more complex the decisions being made, the fewer people will participate and the more focused/passionate/obsessed they will have to be about the topic.

Apr

20

Questionable feedback: Incented and Not

Filed Under Crowdsourcing, Outside Innovation | 1 Comment

This post by Francois Gossieaux on Marketing 2.0 echoes some of my thoughts in a previous post in which I mulled over the balancing act between providing a platform for interested users and creating a paid marketplace for extracting feedback, ideas, work.

Would you rather have feedback from a person who is filling out 10 surveys to gain points towards a gift certificate? Or someone who has sought you out to tell you something they think about your product?

Thus, it seems, unfortunately, that it is generally an either/or proposition.   Either you provide a platform for a group of people who LOVE to contribute — seek you out in order to contribute — or you have a robust marketplace for creating extrinsic incentives for user contribution.

Apr

3

ReDesignMe and BMW

Filed Under Crowdsourcing, Outside Innovation | 1 Comment

BMWBMW has what is basically the equivelant to P&G’s Connect + Develop in which anyone can submit a technical spec for an innovation in which BMW would be interested.  They like it, they’ll buy it.

ReDesignMe is a minimalist, simple implementation of user submitted design improvements and suggestions for existing products. Companies or users submit products which they would like improved along with a description of what they feel is lacking.  A Pro Challenge feature is also available whereby companies may post one of their products or websites for comment and redesign and the most creative or useful submissions win a prize. Here’s one from Vodafone.  Okay, basically this is simply an open blog in which anyone can post a picture of a product with a problem and anyone can upload comments or photos of a redesign.  (Via Springwise.)

Both of these point yet again to what seems to be a no-brainer: Companies should solicit ideas and innovation from everyone, everywhere.  Employees, partners, customers, non-customers, haters.  It doesn’t bind you to anything and doesn’t cost a whole lot, but it could open up your company to any number of innovations that never would have come about otherwise.

Unless you figure out how to run a fascist state (Apple) that produces breathtaking products and services, why not solicit ideas from everyone?


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