Tonight I had a rather random dream about buying a new smartphone. It was a Samsung phone that happened to be a flip phone. The lower part was like a regular smartphone, but the upper part was transparent and had an additional screen. You could see through the upper part through to the screen on the lower part even if the upper part covered it.
Now this might not be a tremendously interesting idea, but at least it is a marginally interesting idea. Sometimes I get these ideas and I don’t know what to do with them. I had always wondered why there is no “canonical” platform for sharing commercializable ideas like this one. This looks like an obvious market gap for me. People could suggest ideas on that platform and companies could implement them. If the companies are nice, they reward those who suggested the idea in the first place.
There is this old system that does something similar. It’s called the patent system and it’s expensive and clunky, so almost nobody uses it. In contrast, more than a billion people use Facebook. Now the key question is: What is the super-popular online platform that effectively kills the patent system?
It could be a platform that I might create in conjunction with Quantified Prestige. That would make a lot of sense, because the reputation economy would make it much easier to reward those who come up with an idea on the platform. In fact, this would seem like a good business model for the development of Quantified Prestige. Earn money and reputation with a platform that people use to share their ideas on.
Yeah, well, I’m full of business ideas, but a bit frustrated that nobody even bothers to steal them to turn them into reality.
Anyway, another question that I have is: Is there actually some kind of public idea sharing platform? Has anyone here actually used it?
What you want/need is a legal background. I mean, it can be done, its just a matter of legality on the implementation.
To point out some stuff here, what legality gives is security of recognition, security of retribution, and security of control. The first one I am sure to skip because you know something, the second one is somewhat misleading because “retribution” can mean “personal retribution”, but also can mean “retribution to the community”, and finally, people want to be recognized as an authority on that which they create.
Knowing all that, if you dig on what the GPL do, you will quickly understand how well suits the need for the legal background of what you ask for.
Of course the legal guarantees are not the only thing needed, because what you are ask for is a repository. Kind of like those in github to serve as host for projects, and for people to “fork” from time to time. But this time, for all kind of projects, not just software, but also hardware.
Open source hardware exists currently, its under the banner “open source ecology”. If you can make a repository with all the schematics of those hardware projects well, just imagine that.
There are many ideation tools - the last large company I worked at also deployed one as part of their drive to innovate. It wasn’t successful as far as I could tell.
For me whenever I see an idea I always want to ask what problem is the idea solving?
So for this reason I’ve taken a different approach and am building something to capture problems. If we can swarm on the problem the crowd may create many innovate solutions. It may take a range of ideas to solve a single problem.
Hence my quest to create a ‘BumpConductor’ (Bump = Big Unsolved Meaningful Problem).
You have a point there in the importance of connecting ideas to problems that they are supposed to solve. I think, this suggests that we shouldn’t restrict ourselves to collecting ideas, but also problems at the same time. Perhaps we should even make it more general and try to incorporate goals, projects, and requirements as in the Jera-Stokosm project by @guillefix. It could even be integrated with the fractal decision making platform, or Democratic intelligence.
All these approaches, including the BumpConductor could be tools of one large overarching platform that is really effective at solving our biggest problems, reaching our goals, and turning our most ingenious ideas into reality. Of course, they still could remain separate tools, which would be quite valuable on their own, but the biggest impact probably can be realized by a totally integrated solution (no matter how we call it – though a good name would help with the branding ;)).