Crowdcasting | How-to Guides for running your business from Business.com

Innovation is tricky work. You hire the best minds, immerse them in your business model, and buy their confidentiality with a title and a salary. Then you hope that they come up with fresh ideas, and keep coming up with them, year after year. Inevitably, your best brains get too entrenched in your culture and stop thinking outside of the box you put them in. Enter crowdcasting, the latest weapon against stale thinking. Using the Internet, you broadcast your problem to a selected audience of thinkers, usually along with a prize or other incentive for solving it. The thinkers not only begin devising solutions, but also refer the problem to others. They network, collaborate, blog, reach out to others in the field and thereby organically build an even bigger community of brains cogitating over your needs. Eventually, you pull in the results, and you buy the best idea(s) with your prize $$. There are different crowdcast models, depending on what your problem is. The model and problem determine the sources from which you will pull your ideas; typical sources include:

1. Schools — business and science schools love awards for the prestige they confer, and are always happy to pit their graduate students against one another to take a prize.

2. Your business partners — if your goal is to improve your business practices, who better to ask than those with whom you do business?

3. Your customers — what better way to learn what they really want than to offer a reward for careful thinking and honest feedback?

Here are the most effective solutions for getting started with crowdcasting:

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Read what others have done

The easiest way to get your head around crowdcasting is to see what it has accomplished for others.

I recommend: Read about the X PRIZEs, crowdcasts aimed at culling ideas that benefit humanity; you've probably heard about one X PRIZE, the one that resulted in the first privately built spacecraft that can carry three passengers. Hilton used crowdcasting to cull ideas to make its hotels more inviting, and Merck built a community for harvesting socially responsible business practices. Check out a long list of smaller efforts in chemistry and biology.

Investigate the facilitators

Not surprisingly, crowdcasting is typically done through facilitators, who may call themselves "Idea Competition" companies, and who use proprietary Internet-based platforms to deliver ("push") your crowdcast to its audience and to harvest ("pull") in the results.

I recommend: The major facilitators now are Innocentive and Idea Crossing.

Blog away

Crowdcasting is a big deal, and one that requires more learning and thought than you can get in a quick article. While you consider it, stay informed…

I recommend: The Innovation Challenge offers its own blog (with an RSS feed), and the Innovation Weblog is another to watch for crowdcasting developments. The book Mavericks at Work includes crowdcasting examples among its techniques for boldly generating innovative ideas. Free, related books online include Democratizing Innovation.

Tips & Tactics
Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

As buzzwords go, "crowdcasting" is new and therefore not well standardized. Don't be confused by another kind of crowdcasting -- targeted television advertising -- and look for sources for the real crowdcasting under such alternate terms as "open innovation" and the related (but slightly different) concept, "crowd sourcing."
If full-scale crowdcasting is beyond your means (or needs), consider how you may apply crowdcasting principles on your own. Is there a community -- your customers or business partners, for example -- you can leverage to develop ideas in exchange for a small prize?