Slashdot Mirror
Idea Stock Exchange
Retrospeak writes to tell us The New York Times has an interesting article on an interesting business strategy used by a company called Rite-Solutions. The system recognizes the need for harvesting ideas from the entire company instead of just one or two "idea-men" in a stock-market-esque idea exchange. From the article: "We're the founders, but we're far from the smartest people here," Mr. Lavoie, the chief executive, said during an interview at Rite-Solutions' headquarters outside Newport, R.I. "At most companies, especially technology companies, the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than senior management. So we created a marketplace to harvest collective genius."
Can I sell ideas short?
Didn't the Japanese have methods like this way back in the 80s??
Listen. Ideas don't come for free. You have to pay money.
see what happened to patents...
My ideas most involve inflatable sex toy, small rodent and chocolate spread. Where do I sign up?
I am the bastard of base minus 12! Turing was the ejaculate of my complete machine!
How often is the person with the idea and the vision the guy with the business smarts to capitalize on it? How often does a company with excellent execution thirst for the next big idea? A marketplace for ideas and innovation is possibly the solution to this.
It may be unpopular here, but in order to make such a market work properly, it's necessary to have the necessary protection for ideas and innovations - i.e., intellectual property laws need to be improved. That isn't to say that draconian laws are needed, but if I have an idea, I need a reasonable expectation that I will not get fleeced by offering it on a marketplace.
An efficient innovation market backed up by appropriate laws may well be the next driver of wealth.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
We're the founders, but we're far from the smartest people here
Anyone who submits an idea gets labelled "not a team player" for not backing management's ludicrous schemes.
It's a trap!
[/end Dilbert-esque paranoia]
I'm going to short neoconservatism.
The difficulty in any system like this is what I like to call the Artistic Paradox.
Great art comes from experience and talent. It almost always comes from the vision of a single individual. Truly fine art cannot be done by committee.
Thus while brilliant and committed people in business need the ideas of those people around them, a system like this can only serve as an inspirational tool for those people with talent. The idea is not the art, the execution of that idea is.
I have lots of great ideas, but no matter how many I give out, or see on the web, few, if any, ever get done. Why? Because I'm lazy.
This marketplace could easily give rise to dependence on it for ideas, and ignore the fact that people who can get things done often don't have the best ideas, but because they can accomplish them, are infinitely more valuable than the armchair quarterbacks scattered throughout a company. And asking people to implement ideas other than their own, even if they are objectively better, reduces a talented individuals ability to great true greatness.
-Ian
That's right, good ideas don't only come from one person in the 'idea department.' If this holds true, and people aren't punished for speaking up, they may be much better for it -- and be able to monitize those ideas. Many companies I have worked for in the past, have an 'open door' policy with opinions, ideas, and better ways to do things. Not once have I ever heard a success story from someone piping-up. Didn't someone say something about hiring people smarter than you?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I have the feeling that an awful lot of ideas out there are the "penny stock" kind -- you know, the type you get a lot of spam about...
My sig is too lon
It might've worked in Japan. It won't work in the Western world. Here's how it would most likely end up:
Some worker on the chain finds out that what he does could be streamlined. He commits some of his free time (you don't think you'll be allowed to hand in ideas during work hours, do you?) to write down his idea and submit it.
Middle management sees the idea, ponders it and punches as hard against it as it can, since it comes from one of the grunt workers and by default, they can't have good ideas. If they did, middle management could be sacked without a problem.
Should the idea somehow survive this pummeling, the middle manager will write his name onto it and ship it upwards. Where it's found to be great and the manager gets a huge bonus.
Should the grunt complain it was originally his idea, his reward is a pink slip.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I doubt my all knowing, all powerful, neighborhood Rite Aid pharmacist is going to take this without a fight.
Isn't that what Google already does, with their personal project time and whatnot? That's how GMail got started, and Picasa, and probably a few other things.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
In our company the ideas are generated by the CEO and his lieutenants - any ideas from the rest of us are met with "Why aren't you getting on with your work?"
OK so our profits have tumbled dramatically since this guy took over a few years ago but money can't buy happiness, right?
Great concept but I can already envision a problem in the (lawless) US where an employee comes up with a great idea and some other employees leave to go pursue development and market delivery of said idea. And they get sued for idea theft or something along that line. What, did something similar happen with RIM / NTP where one great company developed a real, market demanded product that another (totally useless) company claimed was their idea? Hmm... food for thought in the mighty US, isn't it.
(long live Canada)
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
...was among those who came up with the idea. He did note that there was a flaw in the plan, that is, not enough incentive for people to "buy" and "sell" stocks in these ideas, despite the few incentives put in place. The people at NYTimes are currently trying to think of a new incentive method to completely replace the current one, without costing the company much.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Believe that patents and copyrights are sewage, and act on that belief accordingly.
If you did, you would have seen that the internet is more than a passing fad (1992), that Linux
was more than a "toy" os (1996), that the x86 architecture and the IBM compatable PC was going
to take over the market place(2000) inspite of it's original inherent design flaws. That p2p was going
to explode in usage, that ethernet would win out over Novell, and Token-Ring despite being
"technically" inferior. Plus you would have been able to anticipate the technology explosion
that happens every few years when a new technologies 18th annaversary approaches and patents start to
run out.
All to often, a companies version of a great idea is something that they can patent, sit on,
and collect royalities on without any real application usage or work. Well, bullshit - it's just
the opposite. A great idea is something that proliferates and spreads in usage freely, without
restriction.
...employment agreements where the employer claims dominion over something the employee thinks of when he's taking a dump in his house during his Christmas vacation, I don't see how anyone would be trusting enough to throw their good ideas out for the taking like that. What if the company takes your idea and makes billions with it? What's to prevent the company from screwing you from a compensation standpoint?
I need a reasonable expectation that I will not get fleeced by offering it on a marketplace
Definition of "to fleece" (Webster): to charge excessively for goods or services
I think you meant: "I need a reasonable expectation that I will be able to fleece everyone else when I offer it on the marketplace."
Or do you think that although, in general, monopolies must be prevented "to make a market work properly", sometimes a monopoly must be created in order to "make markets work properly", and that Congress knows when to do one and when to do the other?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The idea of a pure meritocracy, although noble, is doomed because it is at odds with existing hierarchies.
In a sense it's the same reason why getting a degree is a good idea nearly 100% of the time. Bill Gates may be the richest man in the world AND a college dropout, but the only reason he was able to achieve this was that he (with a number of other people) formed his own company. The minute you want to step away from the entrepreneurial path you need to have a degree -- any degree, as long as it's a valid one.
Likewise in any existing business hierarchy merely delivering the goods is not good enough -- you have to deliver the goods AND play the office politics game in order to get ahead, and more often than not that means letting your boss take credit for ideas you come up with.
My sig is too lon
Great art comes from experience and talent. It almost always comes from the vision of a single individual. Truly fine art cannot be done by committee.
While not quite a committee, how 'bout remixes -- hip-hop, mashups, or otherwise? I'm sure there's some sort of exception to allow for that. Afterall, remixes are quite popular, some are quite artistic, if not so long lasting.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
hmmm... Maybe the Management Steering Group should start a focus group on this to verify...Is this rumour substantiated at all?
There are plenty of online exchanges for info and ideas, even problems that need solutions that link corporate R&D, Universities, and individual scientists. This is how a lot of companies innovate today - through collaboration, called C&D.
Here's a few:
ninesigma.net
InnoCentive.com
Yet2.com
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
Oh great, a ponzi scheme but with ideas.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
>and ignore the fact that people who can get things done often don't
>have the best ideas, but because they can accomplish them, are
>infinitely more valuable than the armchair quarterbacks scattered
>throughout a company.
Those people you're mentioning who "get can things done," -- isn't it to their interest, and everybody's interest, that they are implementing the very best ideas available? It's not like anybody's suggesting that these people be fired -- if anything the value of what they're able to produce increases as they are given better projects to see through to completion.
And those "armchair quarterbacks" -- this term seems needlessly insulting, by the way -- if these quarterbacks are able to come up with the very best ideas in the company, shouldn't they receive all the encouragement in the world to dream up new ideas? And shouldn't they share the spoils of this success with the people who can implement these great ideas?
Seems to me that this stock exchange idea is win/win/win for the GTD people, the quarterback people, and the company as a whole.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
(Knowledge gathered from the thought-provoking if slightly shallow "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki)
Of course the first smart idea should be a financial model that allows the valuation of other peoples ideas.
That post is exactly the reason why Linus Torvalds made his famous comment:
"Gaah. I don't tend to bother about Slashdot, because quite frankly, the whole _point_ of Slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with people getting together and making their own 'insightful' comment on any random topic, whether they know anything about it or not."
--Linus Torvalds
Yes, in fact, the Japanese used this method to allow the general populace to brainstorm creative solutions to the country's most vexing problem. Unfortunately for them, the demographics of the country were such that the votes of children aged 5-12 largely determined the resulting solution.
GMD
watch this
Can I sell my thoughts short ?
I dunno if a stock market is the best way to model this, it feels more like a futures market to me.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Companies are often the victims of disruptive technology. What makes the technology disruptive is that the company can't take advantage of it because of the company's cost structure. It is often the case that the disruptive technology comes from within the company itself. That is, the company often develops (but can't use) the technology that kills it. This is hard to deal with and is often best solved by splitting off a division specifically to implement the disruptive technology.
The idea exchange is a good idea. Taking advantage of the resulting ideas might be harder than management expected it to be. Good luck guys.
I strongly suggest that these guys read Clayton Christensen's books on innovation and disruptive technology (if they haven't already).
"But the two men, co-founders of Rite-Solutions, a software company that builds advanced -- and highly classified -- command-and-control systems for the Navy, don't worry much about Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange."
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Really early in the Internet's history (about TEN YEARS ago!!!) there was a site called "Idea Futures" that did exactly what this article describes. It was pretty fun... I wonder if it's the same folks.
E pluribus unum
Even the Borg needed a queen.
There are a number of "idea banks" already on the Web such as Should Exist and Halfbakery. These sites are a bit diffrent from the approach described in the NYT article though.
This and other business plans sources can be found in the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.
Speak truth to power.
The system recognizes the need for harvesting ideas from the entire company instead of just one or two "idea-men" in a stock-market-esque idea exchange. From the article: "We're the founders, but we're far from the smartest people here,"
I'm having an Enron flashback
The idea is not entirely dead yet, and so the opposition continues its histerical "criticism" of it...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The market you are referring to is called the Foresight Exchange and is located here (originally launched in 1995). I work for the company that develops the software and we did not develop the Rite-Solutions market. However, we are working with GE, Siemens and others to do the same type of collective forecasting and decision making. More info can be found here.
http://www.ideosphere.com/
It is great, but somewhat sluggish, since you are betting on events years in the future.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
You can't beat a wiki for this kind of thing. I don't mean the "formal" kind like wikipedia, but more like the original: c2.com's Portland Pattern Repository. That is the best place on the web to share random thoughts and opinions on software engineering. (However, it can be a bit messy at times.)
Table-ized A.I.
In the interest of communication sanitation, it would help if someone/something clarify what they mean by "idea." Are we talking about "I feel like meatball hoagie with hot cherry pepper, onion, and extra cheese?" If not, why not (cuz that's my idea at the moment, and a darn good one, too)?
Are we talking multi-billion-dollar new business ideas, or just "Gee, my job would be a whole lot easier if they issued us with black pencils instead of blue ones" ? I can see why employees might be wary of submitting the first type, but the second type is just "I can see how to run this place a little better, but I don't have the authorisation to make the change."
That's a key lesson behind the rise of open source technology, most notably Linux. A ragtag army of programmers organized into groups, wrote computer code, made the code available for anyone to revise and, by competing and cooperating in a global community, reshaped the market for software. The brilliance of Linux as a model of innovation is that it is powered by the grass-roots brilliance of the thousands of programmers who created it.
/. ...
Just in case anyone might wonder why this on
Cute. But in the future's market, the traders at least know what the underlying asset is (though not the price, which is precisely the point of the market). This "idea" business, who the fuck knows what it even means?!
Add http://whynot.net/ to the lot.
Animoog.org
"What's to prevent the company from screwing you from a compensation standpoint?"
Not a single thing. However, note that there is a feedback loop here; it's in the companys' long term interest not to do this. If the company is run by the typical quick-buck artists, then word gets around, and people aren't as motivated to offer their best ideas to the company.
If a competitor has a better compensation plan for employees, then this implementation plan should (in theory) work better there; and over the long term the competitor should do better.
So, in short, market competition between companies over the long term ought to result in filtering out the poorer implementations of this.
Which is refreshing; this sort of approach makes the current standards in industry look positively feudal.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
Did anyone else think of "The Hudsucker Proxy" when they read this article?
"What is it? A circle?"
"It's a hula hoop!"
"No one will ever buy that."
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
A related idea I had recently which I wanted to toss into the open...
Lately on slashdot we've been having a few stories about the (Snow Crash-like) Second Life virtual world, and its active virtual economy. Take this article from Wired:
Wired: Making a Living in Second Life
I think it would be quite interesting to try using Second Life's economy and scriptable world to create an in-game prediction market, similar to that described in the NYT article. Instead of using a purely reputation-based currency such a market could use the game's Linden Dollars, which can be exchanged with US dollars. The use of Linden Dollars would also help get around some of the anti-gambling laws one runs into when US dollars are involved. It seems that in-game scripts can communicate with external servers via email or XML-RPC, so one could probably have such an in-game script placing orders with a server running the open-source prediction market software like Foresight Exchange or Zocalo.
One might even imagine creating a Futarchy-like system, with bids made on decisions about how to make the market (or organization running the market) prosper in the Second Life world. That could be interesting. I've lately been musing a bit on how such a system might be a cute way to create a seed superintelligence, or more precisely, a self-improving collective intelligence.
I'm happy to finally see a slashdot story on prediction markets, like the one described in the article, as they're one of the neatest new concepts I've come across. They've shown themselves to be on average the most accurate way to predict future events, more accurate than, say, individual experts or opinion polls. Having people "put their money where their mouth is" greatly improves the quality of predictions.
If you've never seen a prediction market in action before, I highly recommend checking out the real-money Intrade market, or the virtual-money Foresight Exchange. At such markets you can get estimated probabities for almost any major event. Here's a few examples from Intrade:
* Sony Playstation 3 release before October 6: 33% chance
* Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic Presidential Nominee in 2008: 43.1%
* John McCain to be the Republican Presidential Nominee in 2008: 36.6%
* Osama Bin Laden to be captured/neutralised by 30 June 2006: 5.7%
* Donald Rumsfeld to announce his resignation on/before 31Dec2006: 18.5%
* Bird flu (H5N1) to be confirmed in the USA ON/BEFORE 31st December 2006: 70.0%
That said, I think the company described in the article can probably improve the way they handle their pay-offs. From the article:
At Rite-Solutions, the architecture of participation is both businesslike and playful. Fifty-five stocks are listed on the company's internal market, which is called Mutual Fun. Each stock comes with a detailed description -- called an expect-us, as opposed to a prospectus -- and begins trading at a price of $10. Every employee gets $10,000 in "opinion money" to allocate among the offerings, and employees signal their enthusiasm by investing in a stock and, better yet, volunteering to work on the project. Volunteers share in the proceeds, in the form of real money, if the stock becomes a product or delivers savings.
The wording in the article is a little ambiguous, but it seems that if you choose to bid on an idea which you "know" is good, and would be if it were selected as a product, if other people don't agree you lose your money. It would be better to have a system where if the stock isn't selected as a product, you get your money back. If the product is selected, you gain money if the product does well, and lose money if the product does poorly. This also adds an incentive for people to "short" popular ideas that they think are going to perform poorly.
Earthweb by Mark Stiegler, pretty well-developed and depicted
I'm curious... What kinds of protections are built into this idea exchange to keep people from stealing one person's Billion dollar idea and then patenting it as their own? I'd hate to see some greedy bastards using this site, and end up creating the next SCO or Rambus style legal dispute.
Great art has been achieved through artistic 'collectives' - teams of artists who pool their ideas, workshop, work together to produce a quality piece. This is particularly the case with theatre. Sometimes it is done with a director, others without any leader. Both models can work or fail.
Such a system is quite comparable to Slashdot. Although there are moderators and editors, everyone has a voice, and the ability to contribute. Those contributions that are valuable are invested in by moderators, which means they receive more attention.
This sig is covered under the GPL.
we own all of our employees ideas and we have a large legal team of patent experts....
t m
To sum up our business, its to play teh lawsuit game, to sue any and everybody who uses any of the same ideas that the brains we employ come up with first. Or licenses those ideas to any who want to do them.
Since the USPTO is leaning towards the patenting of not just ideas but the thought of an idea......
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0321-05.h
If a true market were to be created, you could maintain your value by not selling all of your shares.
Let's assume you've discovered The Next Big Idea. So you create a "company" with a ticker symbol of TNBI and issue 100 shares. Keep 50 for yourself and IPO the rest. If your idea has any merit, the shares will climb in value and the 50 shares that you've retained will be your compensation.
Wouldn't it be valuable to let customers participate?
It probably wouldn't work for new product development, but it would be a very cheap way to find out which features your customers want in Version 2.
This sounds like one application of the idea futures market concept, which has been kicking around in academic circles for about a decade now.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm not kidding.
Seastead this.
So what are the inefficiencies in this market that I can arbitrage away? Will there be a derivatives market so I can better hedge my positions?
Why is there such universal agreement in regards to this "wisdom of the market" concept. Who says? Where is the definitive proof. i play on the Foresight Exchange (www.ideosphere.com) with everybody else and it's NOT always right. The stock market makes poor decisions and often purchasing decisions are based on just how "off" experts say that the market is (Google is undervalued/overvalued, etc). I mean, it's fine if companies want to cull their employees for ideas but I hope they don't come under the delusion that just because everybody thinks its a good idea that means it will succeed. Doesn't anybody listen to their mothers anymore? --Just because everybody else is jumping off a bridge, would you do it to?
"I wish my boss would consider this fact in some areas more often :) I think it's a quite normal case in any IT company, the bosses are "oldschoolers", meaning sure they know how a pic cpu works and how perl text databases are cool, but their knowledge doesn't always map to the current situation out there. Transaction rdbms is the word, not a text database."
Audiance. Compare the above to this
"It rewards the people who sit on their ass all day and type their goofy ideas into a web site hoping somebody actually tries to make something some day."
Welcome to Slashdot. You must be new here.
There is a limitless number of ideas, but there is a limited number of experienced workers who can turn ideas into a product. Instead of collecting huge stacks of ideas and let the workers browse through them, the idea-makers should actively sell their ideas to the workers. I mean, workers usually have good ideas of their own, and don't need someone sueing them because they implemented an idea (which they thought up themselves) that already existed in the huge stack. I have no problem with people making money from generating ideas, but they should be part of the team that implements it. Usually it is not the basic idea that is implemented, but the implementation changes the idea until it is workable. The "idea-maker" could help in that, if he or she is really worth anything. But as it is proposed now, I see a huge stack of hare-brained ideas with, purely by chance an unintentionally, a few good ones among them. Which worker would want to go through that rubbish for inspiration?
Doesn't this sound like the Delphi Boards in The Shockwave Rider?
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
How is it different from a discussion forum? Just create a Section called Suggestions & Feedback,
then Add Development section for threads that pass Suggestion phase.
Try for example some unmoderated sci.physics.* groups...
Not to mention that he threw the best company parties I've seen, before or since.
One of my biggest regrets is that I didn't take the opportunity he offered to me a few years ago to come and work for him. Unfortunately, I was just starting a family and had to follow the money. Several times a year I consider contacting RS to see if the offer's still good, but I'm currently riding out a project that would probably fail if I jumped ship, and I actually feel bad about that :(
Maybe this would be obvious if I understood real stocks better, but how do they determine the share price for imaginary stocks? As I read it, the 'idea stocks' use imaginary money, and only the people who implement the good ideas get real money bonuses. I also couldn't tell if they're locked at $10,000 or if they earn more monopoly money for backing ideas that turn out well, thereby giving them a bigger say in subsequent ideas.
How soon they forget. There is a term for when markets go crazy, it's called a bubble. Does this sound familiar to anyone else?
/. discussion.
Using markets to gauge public acceptance sounds like a great idea, using it to uncover hidden truths sounds completely unworkable. Ask anyone who has tried to explain how to program a VCR to their grandparents. The public is unlikely to know much.
Of course the original article was about employees not the public so the article is different from the
Ideas even good ideas do not have the same scope. A digital music player (iPOD) vs E = mc2.
The best way to encourage IP is not to grant a monopoly.
Monopoly is the great enemy of good management. A. Smith
There are now companies which license their IP and never manufacture anything. As long as they don't prevent others from manufacturing things it seems like a good idea. This assumes of course they are actively producing the idea and marketing it. Not the sort of thing Lemelson is accussed of.
Having open licensing sounds like the best way to encourage inovation and have it accepted.
Joe Says: "Hey Jimmy, I'm really stuck for ideas here. I need to somehow justify my $200K salary by coming up with some creative solutions.."
Jimmy (12 yr old son): "Why don't you just pay someone else to come up with ideas?"
Joe: "Great thinking Jimmy but that's what I already do for a living.."
Jimmy: "Well, dad, get THEM to pay YOU for their ideas... are you finished? I need to go pee pee"