Crowdsourcing Looking for a New Home

Techcrunch is reporting on the apparent demise of Cambrian House (slogan:  Home of Crowdsourcing).  I think the spirit of things would be better served if Erick Schonfeld's article were titled "When a Crowdsourcing Model/Business/Effort (take your pick) Fails", as opposed to "When Crowdsourcing Fails".   If Ask.com fails as a search engine model, it doesn't mean search is dead.  Google obviously owns it.  And right now, Innocentive is the leader of the crowdsourcing pack.  It's successful because it targets the right businesses (Seekers) and the right consumers (Solvers).  Rewards are lofty ... in the tens of thousands of dollars ... and the likes of Proctor and Gamble routinely use Innocentive to tap the creative juices of engineers, scientists and other 'high end' professionals around the globe.

So I submit that we have at minimum one highly successful crowdsourcing model already, in Innocentive, and pleny more on the runway trying to get airborne.  The Techcrunch article mentions Crowdspirit, Crowdspring, Fellowforce (of which I have had much involvement over the past ten months), and Kluster.  Each has it's own model, and each targets a different niche.  Fellowforce, from its beginning, had the boldest goal, trying to create an Open Innovation platform that any business on the planet could use to tap creative and passionate consumers around the globe.  I believe a vibrant and successful platform like that is still feasible.  But the kinks will continue to be worked out of all the various models and platforms and efforts, and time will tell which one(s) will join pack leader Innocentive.  Innocentive right now is trying to expand into normal business/consumer innovation challenges, and it'll be interesting to see if it can come down off the mountain and do business in the valley with common folks, regular consumers without graduate degrees, and regular businesses with nominal budgets seeking innovative ideas. 

I wish the best for Cambrian House employees, and I'm sure the Cambrian House creative community will not give up on crowdsourcing.  I look for them to filter out across the web in search of new places to feel at home.  All are certainly welcom here, and I'm sure other consumer-generated idea communities are rolling out the welcome mat as well.  Places to check out, if you're a Passionate Consumer, with ideas to share (and please share some I am not listing ... I want to make a master list of various crowdsourcing and Consumer Created Content/Creative Sharing communities and blogs): 

• Crowdspring
• Fellowforce
• Crowdspirit
• Kluster
• Spigit
• SuggestionBox.com
• UserVoice
• Innocentive
• 99Designs
• IdeaScale
• BrightIdea
• Imaginatik

** UPDATE***

Cambrian House CEO Michael Sikorsky responded to the Techcrunch article in the comment section. He basically says that yes, the original 'model' of Cambrian House is dead, but the company will live on as part of Vencorps.  Sikorsky talks honestly about the failure of Cambrian House to take crowdsourced ideas and put them into action.  These are some key points he made:

A key assumption for us, which proved out NOT true: given a great idea with great community support and great market test data, we would be able to find (crowdsource) a team willing to execute it OR we could execute it ourselves. We needed amazing founding teams for each of the ideas – this is where our model fell short.

What we learned: it would have been better to back great teams with horrible ideas because most of the heavy lifting kept falling back on us, or a few select community members. A vicious cycle was created leading all of us to get more and more diffuse.

Hence: the wisdom of crowds worked well in the model, but it was our participation of crowds aspect which broke down. Trying to find people willing or capable to take on the offspring (our outputs) of the CH model was hard and/or incredibly time consuming.

  ... The ‘rebirth’ with VenCorps goes to fix the failures I identified above. With VenCorps, the ideas don’t matter anywhere as much as the teams do.

I’m bullish crowdsourcing but how/what you can apply it to is still under-test

Comments

[Matt]

Here's an addition for your list: http://www.99designs.com - Crowdsourcing for graphic design.

Large community. Over $10,000 in prize money paid out every week (well over $1 million in total) and a new design submitted every 60 seconds!

[Jeff Crites]

thanks Matt, I'll add it ...

[Paul Tran]

I'm surprised you missed BrightIdea.com. We have been providing idea and innovation management for the past 8 years and use crowdsourcing for our leading WebStorm product line. A good example of crowdsourcing using our product is Cisco's iPrize (www.cisco.com/iprize) where Cisco used our product to find the next billion dollar idea. Ideas were collected, ranked, and catagorized from over 90 participating countries. We are working to turn those ideas into reality with our Pipeline Mgmt Application.

Paul
ptran@brightidea.com

[Jeff Crites]

Thanks for making me 're-aware' of BrightIdea. Only reason it slipped my mind and list was it hasn't appeared on my radar for some time, no blurbs or blog posts or news releases that I've picked up on lately. I do remember a great Forbes article some time back spotlighting BrightIdea and ... I'm thinking of another ... hold on while I search my saved article file. Yes, Imaginatik as well (Dec '06: The SuggestionBox 2.0: http://tiny.cc/VlND9) I'll check your site again to see what you've been up to. thnx!