“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas”
Somewhere in the near future CambrianHouse.Com, “home of crowdsourcing”, will reach the impressive amount of 5000 posted ideas by its zealous crowdsourcing community. CH is undoubtedly one of the most inspiring websites in the domain of crowdsourcing. Named after the Cambrian period, an era where an explosion of genetic diversity occured, the website is a platform where crowds come up with a similar explosion of creative ideas for new software products and businesses. Generating the ideas alone is not enough; CH is also the place where the community builds the ideas and eventually gets to share the profit of the businesses that come out as a result of their work.
I have seen CH evolving into a more and more open-minded concept. At the time I subscribed CH was focussed on picking a good idea and commercialising it as a company. In this way the ‘fuzzy front end’, was performed by the creative crowds, and the hard business part is done by a company (CH) in a more traditional way. The concept changed when Cambrian House started to give every idea poster the opportunity to start a business with his/her idea. They even started giving community members real stock in Cambrian House. So in my eyes CH shifted from a company that commercialised ideas from the crowds into a company that allowed the crowds to commercialise their own ideas. Crowdsourcing in optima forma…
Metrics:
A quick analysis of the activity on the site learns me that there are about 12800 registered users (of whom 2500 users logged in in the last month). These users generated 4973 ideas of which 206 were turned into businesses although only 72 businesses have more than one participant. The actual amount of commercialised ideas is not published, but is 3 as far as I know (does somebody know?).
What I think of these metrics is that Cambrian House has proven to be a great source of innovative ideas. The big challenge faced now is to commercialise more of the ideas. As many of the 5000 CH frogs as possible must be turned into princes. The big question is: should a company kiss the frogs (CH as it was), or can this be outsourced to the crowds?
The answer to this question is in my eyes of paramount importance for CH in particular and the future of crowdsourcing in general.
Kisses! Carl
8 Responses to “Kiss 5000 Frogs”
- 1 Pingback on Jun 29th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
- 2 Pingback on Aug 2nd, 2007 at 8:48 am
- 3 Pingback on Mar 28th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
ewww
Hiya Carl,
Great blog post!
You raise some great points. Ideas are one thing. Turning them into viable businesses is another.
We are working hard to give everyone the tools and services necessary to turn their ideas into reality.
Just this week we released our first stab at the community distribution system (Royalty Points and Cambros)
http://tinyurl.com/2×4ky7
And are keen to make it easier for people to connect going forward.
Thank you for the post. I look forward to following many more posts here.
All the best - JR
Update: I just got some new info on the amount of commercialised ideas at CH quoting JR on
http://www.cambrianhouse.com/forums/topic/ch-com/1324/
*QUOTE
Regarding the numbers. If by successful spinoffs you means ideas that have been actually commercialized within CH we’ve got:
GWABS
Robin Hood Fund
Prezzle
Other ideas that I know are going pro include:
FilmLot (AndyDoan)
These are the ones I am most familiar with. I suspect there are a few more out there, I just can’t say they have commercialized however.
JR
*UNQUOTE
Its a great idea, terbble website…so not userfriendly.
Any alternatives, the article was harly worth posting it was so lacking in info.
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