Last week in class we had a special guest speaker. He briefly talked about a great new social platform called ideablender when he was talking about crowd sourcing and how his group has used it. I looked ideablender up and was very excited about what they are doing.
So what exactly is ideablender?
Simply defined, ideablender is a social solution development company that connects companies, academic institutions, public sector, and non-profit organizations with a global network of some of the brightest thinkers to solve tough business challenges.
Learn more about ideablender:
Website
http://www.ideablender.com/
Follow them on twitter @blenderlounge
http://twitter.com/blenderlounge
Find them on Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/ideablenderpage
Our speaker, Eric, talked about a new opportunity ideablender was working on promoting called the Chicago Storm Water Challenge. Chicago’s Water Management group is looking to improve upon the current Flow Restrictor, Vortex Restrictor, being used in residential catch basins. The opportunity is a public crowd sourcing challenge open to engineers, problem solvers, and institutions like Universities. Check out the website to see an example of what they are helping people do through crowd sourcing and to learn more about the challenge.
Chicago Storm Water Challenge
http://www.ideablender.com/water/
Crowd Sourcing
I have mixed feeling about crowd sourcing. I like it because it can be a great opportunity to connect the right talent with the right companies. I am more open to the idea now than I have been in the past because of the Open Innovation movement. I think people should get paid to do work so I cringe a little when I find a craigslist ads for a company looking for people to submit their ideas for their company website and they will get back to the people with the ones they like the best. This type of Crowd Sourcing is not a good idea except for a few maybe new graduates but you get what you pay for in the end. I was impressed with Chicago’s Storm Water Challenge because it paid 10,000 for all ideas that were solid enough to make it into the conception phase and was awarding a contract for $3-$10 million dollars for the actual work. This will be one opportunity to watch over the next few months.
What are your thoughts on Crowd Sourcing? Would you spend your time working on ideas that might not see any return? Do you think this is a fad and will eventually fade away or do you think this is a growing trend here to stay?
Naomi Synstelien
(...wishing I was a Civil Engineer so I could design water solutions for this challenge)
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