Ideagoras: Marketplaces for Ideas

Idea: a vision of the mind. The human capacity to contemplate ideas is associated with the capacity for reason, self-reflection, and the ability to acquire and apply wisdom.

Agora: The ancient greek word for marketplace. The agora was an essential part of an ancient Greek polis or city-state. An agora acted as a marketplace and a forum to the citizens of the polis.

“P&G figures that for every top-notch scientist inside its labs, there’s another 200 outside who are just as good. That’s a total of 1.8 million people whose talents it could potentially tap into”. One of the means to accomplish this is making use of Innocentive, an ideamarketplace that connects the knowledge of over 120.000 scientists to companies in need of innovation.

I believe it were Tapscott and Williams came up with the term Ideagora (idea+agora) for such idea marketplaces. This post is supposed to do justice to our “directory” status. Below are all the ideagoras I could find. If you know more, please leave it in the comments and I’ll update.

Some companies try it on their own: Unilever, Shell, Kraft and others, but I can’t imagine that’s optimally successful. Even the Big Guys would be better off to tap into networks like these (network externalities baby!):

Innocentive: Some 125,000 scientists from 175 countries have already registered with InnoCentive, a matchmaking system that links experts to unsolved R&D problems, allowing these companies to tap the talents of a global, scientific community. Launched as an e-business venture by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Eli Lily in 2001, the company now provides on-demand solutions to innovation-hungry titans such as Boeing, Dow, DuPont, and Novartis.

Insight is the first Web community to connect passionate number crunchers with the information and collaborative tools they need to solve the biggest challenges facing businesses and social organizations today.

NineSigma enables clients to source innovative ideas, technologies, products and services from outside their organizations by connecting them to the best innovators and solution providers from around the world.

Crowdspirit is an ideagora for ideas about consumer electronics (it’s more).

Eureka Medical offers services to both inventors and innovation-seeking companies. For medical inventors, they offer no-cost services to help refine and present medical product ideas to the best-matched medical supply companies.

FellowForce: “Open for Innovation”. People earn money by winning idea challenges put out by companies.

Battle of concepts: A Dutch idea challenge site that focusses on students. They use the ideas to screen university talent.

Swedish author of the ideabook his site interesting.org could be an ideagora but I can’t read it (can somebody tell me?)

Yahoo answers could well be used as an ideagora. Putting this site on the list makes me aware of the question what separates ‘ideas’ from ‘knowledge’. Very interesting to write/think about, but later

Linkedin answers, very similar but ‘linked in’.

Cambrian House “Home of Crowdsourcing”. A zealous community of software oriented ideas. Vote for my idea here.

IdeaConnection’s Collaborative Problem Solving, Creativity and Idea Exchange website. Use this service to Solve Problems, Seek Solutions, and Create ideas and products.

Idea Crossing fuses the groundbreaking ideas of passionate individuals with the curiosity of forward-thinking organizations through the design, production, and operation of innovation competitions.

Idea-a-Day “where ideas are free”. A place to submit your ideas to, and let other ideas inspire you.

Ideabroker: Not linking to companies per se, but this is a place for gathering momentum, funds, talent for ideas.

The Global Ideas Bank aims to promote and disseminate good creative ideas to improve society. It further aims to encourage the public to generate these ideas, to participate in the problem-solving process.

IdeaVolcano is a place where ideas and entrepreneurs meet.

Ideagoras.net will use the collaborative power of the internet to bring the creative nature of the world together to bring value back to the human race.

The InnovationXchange (IXC) is a commercially neutral, not-for-profit, global knowledge network which delivers the ground breaking IXC Intermediary Service to business and research - a new way to find the connections you need.

CreativeCapitals.Org is one of our own projects which will be an ideagora, if you will, for the public sector.

Update: CreativeCapitals turned into www.verbeterdebuurt.nl. It will be an ideagora, if you will, with ideas on geo maps. 

Halfbakery.com This site isn’t particularly clear to me, but there are some nice ideas on it. Have a look at panic PIN for example…

This list is raw data, there is a lot to be said about what binds and differentiates these initiatives. I will surely do this on this blog, but trackback on this post to keep me aware of what you think.
Please help me to expand this list! Comment or mail me; carl at creativecrowds. (dotcom)