Crowdsourcing to help entrepreneurs

I've been surfing the Internet looking for new ideas and trends and found out about some interesting crowdsourcing sites. As outsourcing is a way to delegate some work to an external group, crowdsourcing is an extension of it and allows to delegate some tasks to an a-priori undefined group of people.

This has been very popular in the open-source community. Developers from all around the world joined projects by themselves and users were giving feedbacks without having being asked to do so.

On openinnovators.net there is a page with a bunch of crowdsourcing sites. Because most of the companies I worked for were startups, I was mostly interested to see how crowdsourcing can help people to start their company.

The first one I tested was cambrianhouse.com, a canadian startup company founded in Calgary, AL. On their site, anybody can submit an idea and get evaluated by others. Every week the site determines a winner based on votes and he receives... $100 and will take part in a quarterly championship that offers cash prize and exposure to ventures.

The first question that arises is why would you post an idea on it? If you haven't developed anything to be ready to present to potential investors, it may appear to be very risky to submit your ideas. People can just steal them and you are screwed. My guess is that because their championship happens only every 12 weeks, people will tend to present their good ideas only during the last few weeks so that if their ideas are selected for the championship they may have a rapid exposure to ventures.

The site gives also an incentive to vote because you can get... $1 when you evaluate all the projects of a week. When I registered, there was about 30 ideas to evaluate.

The site ideablob, a US company created by Advanta, a banking company. You have a contest every month and the winner can earn $10,000 which is decent this time and will allow you to take at least some months off to work on your idea. Also the fact that the contest is run frequently is also a good thing. When I came to the site, there were about 50 ideas to be evaluated.

Crowd Spirit, a French company created a similar system but for for electronic products (e.g., mp3 players, webcam, ...). People can submit their ideas and let the crowd will vote (rate, say your intention to buy, discuss...). Then the winners can apparently select a "core team" to help them develop the ideas with partners. Then people can test the first prototypes. I don't really know about how often then select projects but that sounds interesting.

whynot.net is a site where people can submit their ideas and receive feedbacks from other people. Ideas can range from design of new plastic bag to website for dating. I was actually quite surprised to see that there were about 2000 ideas submitted even if there were not really any incentives to submit your ideas other than receiving feedbacks.

Finally, there is the Entrepreneur Challenge sponsored by Keiretsu and Spigit. This is more for startups which have already something to show. You can submit your ideas and people can vote for them. Over the year, they organise contests and select 6 finalists and one of them will be able to present their idea to Keiretsu investors for funding.

Crowdsourcing is now very a very hot topic. We saw in this post that it can help entrepreneur to advertise and get quick feedback from the community. In a next post, I will investigate some more crowdsourcing sites.