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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??
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.
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
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?
Ideas don't come for free
Uhmm.. I just got an idea.. absolutely for free...
Nobody can make me pay to use my brain.
What are you? A commy? *shifty eyes*
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
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?
Did you even read the article? Oh wait, this is /.
Your "description" of how it works is utterly and completely wrong. In fact, it's near opposite to how this program works.
I'd tell you to RTFA, but it seems clear you're just trolling.
As someone already commented, I'd hate to work at your company.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
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
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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
I'm not kidding.
Seastead this.