The definition of ideagora, has beed popularized by Tapscott and William’s book Wikinomics in 2006. An Ideagora is a mass knowledge based marketplace for intellectual-based property and knowledge products and services. http://www.yet2.com is an example of an ideagora.

Ideagora

Ideagora is a new term, coined by Williams and Tapscott (2006) in their book wikinomics, and refers to mass knowledge-based marketplaces made possible by an abundant supply of intellectual property, and an abundant demand for freelance problem solvers. Ideagora marketplaces have been made possible by the internet, which has dramatically reduced the financial and physical resources needed for intellectual property sellers to find demand for their knowledge.

Quite possibly the most famous ideagora success story is about a then-fledgling Canadian mining company called Goldcorp. Goldcorp’s internal R&D department couldn’t seem to properly map the best places to mine in on a property that Goldcorp had already spent millions exploring. They set up an ideagora on their website explaining the details of their problem, offered all of their previous gergraphic data, and invited anyone to use it in an attempt to find gold. They had submissions from all over the world which included methods of exploration that Goldcorp had not thought of internally. The company offered 500 million to anyone who could successfully find the gold deposits. As a result of submissions from the ideagora they had set up, Goldcorp found 10 billion dollars worth of gold.

Ideagoras have been enabled by the internet and by web 2.0 social networking technologies. They represent a paradigm shift in the way businesses think about intellectual property in that ideagoras depend on the free distribution of intellectual property within a community (ideagora) for the purposes of innovation.

Some ideagora web communities offer financial rewards for successful solutions, but do not always offer economic or financial incentives to participants. Many ideagora communities operate on the premise of peering, open-source, and collaboration. An example of this is the ideagoras that have sprung up around linux. IBM has been a major contributor to linux ideagoras, and have opened up massive amounts of their intellectual property to benefit the community.

Ideagora communities have integral in large-scale innovation, which is becoming increasingly difficult for any one company to manage inside of their own R&D organization. Even Proctor and Gamble, with an R&D team of over 7000 scientists, has openly embraced the concept of the ideagora. In fact, they have openly committed to the use of outide R&D through ideagoras.

Ideagora web sites, such as http://www.yet2.com/, allow companies to post questions, problems, and requests for other knowledge, and to invite responses from experts in a particular field. This allows those companies using ideagora communities to expand the base of knowledge to which they have access, which in turn, increases the liklihood of discovering a successful solution within a pre-determined time frame.

Education has also taken advantage of ideagora communities to facillitate tasks such as program evaluation, reviews of instructional materials, and a way for educators to share ideas and educational strategies.

I see an ideagora as an enabler, connecting entities with problems to entities with solutions, at a low cost. Ideagora communities have essentially changed the economics of research, developement, knowledge work, and intellectual property.