Crowdsourcing Idea Game

Description

Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva:

"The (Crowdsourcing) idea game ... is essentially just a massive call for ideas.

Example: A broadly published example of an idea market is the IBM Idea Jam (for a detailed description see (Bjelland & Wood 2008). In 2006 IBM initiated a global idea jam related to the question how to best use and efficiently commercialize existing technological developments in the company. The global ‘Innovation Jam’ took place in two three-day phases in 2006. It involved 150,000 IBM employees, family members, business partners, clients (from 67 companies) and university researchers. Participants from 104 countries jammed and conversations continued 24 hours a day. In its press releases IBM described the Innovation Jam as “the largest online brainstorming session ever”. The discussion and sourcing for ideas was pre-structured in six major categories of emerging technologies and each of the categories comprised several subtopics. The task of the crowd was to brainstorm about potential new ways how technology developed at IBM might be applied by IBM to enhance existing or develop new products. More than 46,000 ideas were posted. Phase Two of the Innovation Jam was devoted to ‘refining’ ideas from the first phase. The Innovation Jam uncovered and mobilized support for substantial new ways of using IBM technology.

This kind of crowdsourcing is considered as ‘Selective Crowdsourcing’ by (Schenk & Guittard 2011). The company initiating the process of crowdsourcing has to choose one solution from all solutions provided by the crowd. Selective crowdsourcing in general implies a winner takes it all mechanism where only the creator of the winning solution is rewarded." (http://berlinsymposium.org/sites/berlinsymposium.org/files/crowdsourcingenabledinnovation.pdf)