Daniel and Pete are hard at work to put the final modules in place for the platform. The base itself works very well and I’ve been using it in as many occassions as possible to test how easy it would be live capture the ideation process. So far the results have been good. But I’m excited to share with guys and gals the platform after the bells and whistles have been added. So sign up for Beta!
Most books geared towards startup culture/life are written with an older mindset. Ben’s take is particularly insightful because there’s a lot to absorb and overcome when you’re a young entrepreneur.
I had the opportunity to attend Duke’s Second Annual Conference on Intellectual Property yesterday. I was there for a Panel on “Impediments to Technology Markets: What are they, and what can firms and government do?†and a keynote on “Collaborative Innovationâ€.
The panel was quite interesting and insightful. There were so many good ideas being thrown around I decided to pull up the IdeaBahn platform to start live idea capturing. I was surprised at how easy the new UI and layout is when you quickly want to jot down the different concepts.
In any case, IP is an area of interest for me personally because I struggled with these concepts as I was refining IdeaBahn’s value proposition. There is a balance between free for all ideation (completely open crowd sourcing) and ownership of those ideas. Ideas, those especially that have the potential for monetization or commercialization fall into this pot. Kluster, a startup that launched at TED earlier this week is attempting to openly crowd source ideas and I really do wish them luck.
I do not believe the frameworks, tools and the mindset are present in the majority of the market to make a “market for IP†or “market for ideas†successful today. That does not mean it’s never going to work, it means there are number of paradigm shifts that need to happen before IP is freely traded, manipulated and valued. I’m certainly glad to hear that shifts like this a finally happening in Fortune 500 companies, but there is a lesson to be learned for smaller companies as well. If we adopt this mindset from the start, there is more to be gained through collaboration than hoarding of information.
Some of the key impediments that I jotted down (food for thought):
1. Resistance – it comes from unexpected places and people do not want to be responsible for their inaction.
2. Transparency – there is no simple way to value the IP. Sure there is a market when a buyer and seller meet, but there is no systematic way of determining the intrinsic value.
3. Risk and Fear – giving up control to IP that may come back to hound if it’s wildly successful in the hands of someone else.
4. Liquidity – there isn’t enough liquidity to create a sustainable and perpetual marketplace.
Brilliantly sums up the excuses people give for killing ideas!
The Problem with Social Media Marketing:
Joshua at Bokardo (cool name!) wrote an excellent post on how companies believe that by using social tools such as social networks (facebook, digg etc) they can build buzz around their product/service thereby leading to greater adoption. The main argument is that this implies causality. When in fact as we have all experienced social tools are highly organic and buzz can only be created when your product/service is worthy of virality in the first place.
At IdeaBahn this is especially important to us because delivering a solution via SaaS and being bootstrapped limits our advertising dollars which can be spent in traditional media. Rather we want to create a compelling platform that brings value (multiple times what you paid us) to you so that you are compelled to recommend us to your peers.
I really want to get this book. Too bad its $40 and it’s not available on Amazon.
Very interesting post on how typically when one thinks of innovation we constantly think of adding features. Whereas the opposite, reducing the number of features can be innovative as well. Something to think about in the IdeaBahn platform and certainly not very hard to implement.
Collaborative decision making tool to cut the fat from your ideas for the win!
Hopefully this is going to be a good replacement for Wordpress.