Ideagora, a Marketplace for Minds
For years, companies pursued acquisitions, alliances, joint ventures, and selective outsourcing in the quest to please shareholders. But today, these conventional tools are simply too rigid, and not scalable enough, to drive growth and innovation at a level that will make companies truly competitive.
In contrast, ideagoras create a vibrant marketplace of connections in which companies can leverage other people’s talents, ideas, and assets quickly and move on. What’s more, the pool of talent at their disposal in a marketplace like InnoCentive vastly exceeds what one company could hope to marshal internally.
Ideagoras like InnoCentive and TopCoder offer companies access to a wealth of new ideas and uniquely qualified minds, but learning how to tap the potential of a global ideagora means turning the R&D organization on its head. Companies would no longer invent first and ask questions later. They would ask, “What do our customers really need?” and then scour the “eBay for innovation” for the necessary inventions and technologies.
R&D labs would be ambidextrous: building on core capabilities internally, while acquiring the greatest, most complementary ideas externally. The deep-rooted “plan and push” modality would give way to a new approach to innovation in which companies engage and co-create with the best available talent.
