Top 5 applications to "crowdsource" personal & small business innovations

July 21, 2009 at 9:39 pm · Filed under Blog ·  Print This Post

Once upon a time, a creative mind came up with an idea. It was such a great idea that, it could have driven a  positive change for many people, businesses, and governments… Although he was proud of his idea, the creative mind never shared or acted on it. Eventually, the idea was forgotten, forever…

If this story was taking place prior to web2.0 era, this creative mind could be regarded as “unfortunate”. But today, he’s more likely to be regarded as “foolish”, because now the Internet gives us all the tools to turn our ideas into real innovations, small or big.

Do you have a business, a product feature, or a political reform idea? Even if you don’t want to develop it, share it with relevant people and spark a change. Or don’t stop there… Gather the needed resources yourself (funds, engineers, publicity..), and realize the dream. So, here are the tools:

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• Just like Zafer from Turkey, who imagines better city planning in Istanbul or Zac who wants to create superior web comics, you can use Borgger –the collaborative thought engine– to “shout” your ideas to all the world. Borgger community gives feedback to your ideas, thus help you to revise and make them even better. Perhaps, some like-minded ones will approach you  using the networking feature, and they will join the effort to make the dream a reality.

• coFundOS, on the other hand, let’s you realize ideas relating to a more specific domain: software applications. So do you have a project idea stemming from personal needs? Then post it on coFundOS, just like this user who needs an extension for the Thunderbird web browser. Then the crowdsourcing process starts. First, you collaborate with community to refine the idea and project requirements. Then, the project must be funded, by you and others who have the similar needs. Finally, specialists who can realize the project come in. They only get paid if the funders agree that requirements have been met. A promising concept, yet a big limitation is that the resulting software may only have an open source license.

• Wridea, created by Turkish entrepreneur Cem Hurturk, is a very simple tool that lets you document and organize your ideas,  as well as discuss them with friends that you invite. There’s also an interesting feature called “idea rain” which allows further brainstorming on your ideas. Plans are underway to make a major update to Wridea, which will add key functionality such as idea tagging, voting, and others.

• IdeaScale, is promoted as a business tool to turn customer feedback into business innovations, however, it can practically be used as a tool to discuss and refine ideas of any group or community. It allows voting, commenting, categorizing, and tagging the ideas, as well as marking them “under review” (i.e. can be used for bugs in software), “in progress”, and “completed”. Not all the functionality is free however, most require a monthly fee ranging between $15 to $100 per month. IdeaScale claims that their application is being used by Microsoft, US government, Mozilla Foundation, and others.

• Kluster brands itself as “a group decision-making platform that helps bubble up new ideas and see which ones fly”. It offers quite similar functionality to IdeaScale, however it’s not customer facing (because only users you invite can participate), and you can rate ideas in multiple criteria (i.e. rate a prototype with respect to “Layout”, “Color”, “Readability”). It also offers extensive analysis with regards to “how much support an idea has from who” and “whose support you’re really going to need to make the idea happen”.

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A major problem with most of these applications is that they’re either too new (so they lack some important features), or they lack a sizable community to make them useful crowdsourcing platforms. I could see similar applications that will be developed as a plug-in for existing networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, which could boost the participation.

Another shortcoming, is their ability to integrate into existing project management solutions, such as basecamp or activecollab. It would have been cool, if small businesses could use these tools within their existing project management solutions.

Now, I also want to give a few advice for the users of these applications.  Please don’t forget that, even the Internet makes innovation resources accessible for everyone, the chances that someone will simply adopt your idea and realize them are slim. You are the one responsible from your dreams and passions… Furthermore, don’t forget that tools are just tools. Often, software features mean very little, the biggest challenge is educating and motivating users to drive intended results.

If you’re in need of a more sophisticated crowdsourcing platform, wait for my article “Top 5 applications to  crowdsource enterprise innovations” where I will explore  Chaordix, InnovationSpigit, HiveLive, Kindling, and MindManager. These actually may have great personal & small business uses as well, however they are quite pricey, too!

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