Today, there are a variety of ideagora companies just waiting to fill the R&D need and to solve the problems of today’s corporations, educational institutions, and government agencies.

yet2,com is one of the oldest ideagora companies, and has been on the web since the dot com boom. Today, a variety of corporations use yet2 to offer their data and problems in hopes that the ideagora company can match them with the unique mind needed to solve it.

InnoCentive,  yet2.com,  Nine Sigma, and YourEncore

Effect of Ideagoras on Internal R&D

Since ideagoras have become a virtually limitless source for R&D, some companies have been able to reduce their budget for internal R&D employees. In essence, the effect of ideagoras on internal R&D has equalled the same amount of spending, but with that budget split between internal R&D operations and external R&D opportunities through ideagoras.

The difference is that the budget for sourcing R&D through ideagoras can be used more effectively and as an investment. The contrast is similar to the contrast in pay-per-action advertising and banner advertising. When companies can define and spec-out a project with a known end goal or product, they can better calculate the payoff and make better investment decisions. This is different than hiring a local R&D staff, and hoping that they can collectively come up with the right solutions in the right time. With ideagoras, companies can post the specific problem to thousands, at little to no cost, and only pony up the real expense if and when a correct pre-determined solution or outcome is satisfied.

Companies no longer have to motivate, develop, and retain all of their best people internally. Great internal talent will still be needed, but can be done on a smaller scale. The effect of ideagoras is that smart companies can, increasingly, assume that many of the best people are to be found outside of their corporate walls and outside of their corporation’s geographic location. The effect of ideagoras on the equation is that corporations now have an “eBay for innovation” where a massive amount of unique talent is no more than a few clicks away.

Today’s ideagoras, like yet2 and innocentive, have yet to paralell eBay in size, the base has been built, and the sky is the limit.

Using Ideagoras to Monetize Intellectual Property.

The internet has broken down many of the physical barriers that have prevented companies from monetizing and capitalizing on some of their knowledge assets. Search costs, administration costs, time, distance, and finding a market for the assets were at one time major barriers.

Smart companies have been using ideagoras to monetize intellectual property because ideagoras, along with the fact that ideagoras are enabled by the internet, have allowed them bypass many of the barriers to this monetization. Ideagoras have allowed companies to more easily create, assemble, integrate, transfer, exploit, and manage their intellectual property and knowledge assets.

Ideagoras for Matching Knowledge Workers with Unique Problems

It has been said that chance favors the prepared mind. Ideagoras have helped to take the chance out of the equation. Think about it. Every single person in the world has a unique set of knowledge and experience, and each task, job, function, problem, or project in the world would be best performed by one specific person in the world who holds the best, unique set of skills and experience. When you think about it, if you had the chance to review every single person’s qualifications, and have somehow narrowed it down to five unique people with the specialized skills to complete your task. Still one of those five will be better prepared to handle it than the others. Of course this is the ideal situation if time and money were not an issue in the recruiting process. If we apply the uses of ideagoras to this problem, we break down a lot of the physical barriers to posing a task to prospective knowledge worker problem solvers.

Companies presumaby want to have access to the maximum number of applicants as possible, and applicants want access to the most opportunities as possible, pending the physical limitations of time, distance, and cost. Since ideagoras have been enabled by the internet, the time, distance, and cost limitations can be removed from the equation.

Companies that use ideagoras  have been expanding their R&D departments to anyone in the world with the skills and knowledge to solve their specific problems. This has been leveraged by the fact that many of the world’s brightest minds are seeking more meaningful work outside of the traditional confines of the normal corporation’s knowledge jobs. Companies can now work backward with their traditional product development cycle. They can now determine what their customers really need, and then use ideagoras to seek the innovation, intellectual property, and technology needed to produce that product. In a way, a common use for ideagoras is that they are becoming a sort of auction house for knowledge, just like Ebay has become an auction house for physical goods and services.

Ideagoras can match knowledge workers with unique problems based on the fact that ideas and innovations are increasingly originating from outside corporate walls. Also helping the equation is the fact that  the internet has created web-based virtual talent pools where freelance knowledge workers are stepping in to fill the need.

Uses for Ideagoras

There are numerous different uses of ideagoras in the knowledge markets  of today. One of the most beneficial uses for ideagoras is their use as a conduit for skilled knowledge workers to seek work that best fits their specific and unique skills. (job hunting) Another one of the more common uses for ideagoras is the use by intellectual property producing companies to monetize thier unused intellectual property. Many companies, including P&G have been using ideagoras to monetize their intellectual property.

What is an Ideagora

An ideagora is a marketplace for intellectual-based products and services. What is an ideagora you ask, and where does that name come from? The term ideagora comes from the Greek word “agora” which refers to places where people and businesses meet to buy and sell goods and services. Although ideagoras of today involve a financial exchange of some sort, there are numerous ideagoras that do not. To add to what an ideagora is, we can explore their social implications. Ideagoras allow information and solution seekers to field their problem to a great number of people, while the information providers and problem solvers are given the opportunity to use, and sometimes monetize, thier knowledge and skills.

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.

Wow. I was embarassingly had by this one yesterday. 2 full years of virus free computing in my home office. I’m still not sure what happened but it was most likely from a site I was browsing.

Basically, the stuff on castlecops, and other sites with steps to rid yourself of this virus DO NOT WORK. You can only fully rid yourself by doing a complete re-imaging.

Here are the symptoms:

you get popups almost immediately after you close them. They look JUST like the windows security center. Also, your “folder options” menu is removed, via a registry setting. Your browser is hijacked so that when you click on a google search result (to try to fix the issue) you are redirected to a “buy this anit-spyware” site.
It also causes admin users to see a “registry editing is disabled by your administrator” message, even when you are an admin user.

It kills google chrome completely. Horrible.

do youself a favor, and save hours in troubleshooting time, and just re-image.

virtual for

I’m just doing an experiment to test an SEO theory, and I’m using the phrase “virtual For” in my test.

virtual for

My research has indicated to me that a suprisingly large number of folks search the term virtual for but it occurred to me that I have no idea what they would be looking for.

PLEASE POST DETAILS ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE ACTUALLY LOOKING FOR …in the comment section below.

Keywords Include:

for virtual
virtualfor
virtual_for
virtual for
virtual-for

I had a $50 Facebook advertising credit that I got through my GoDaddy purchases last month and so today I decided to do a trial ad placement on facebook. I set up the ad placement targeting USA users over 18 years of age with “billiards” marked as their interests. Facebook’s ad system advised me that I would have an audience of roughly 30k users based on those selections.

I submitted the ad, with a maximum bid of 0.20 cents per click. (although they suggested roughly 0.55 cents per click would have been a more appropriate bid if I wanted my ads to appear – I later found that this was way high.)

My ad has been live for about 2 hours, and here are some of the statistics:

Yes, you are reading correctly – thats a cool 0.17 % – thats roughly 2 tenths of 1% – for a clickthrough rate.

I’ll keep the ad live until I burn through half of the $50 credit I have. At the half way point, I’ll try tinkering with the copy a little, and maybe change the landing page. (Although the golden rule is change one thing at a time, and measure.)

Based on what I see so far, though, I really don’t think facebook advertising is really worth the money, unless you are advertising something REALLY cool for tweenies – but then again, if you product/service was really that COOL, you wouldn’t need to advertise it.

Seriously though, I’d be way better off buying an ad banner or text link on the homepage of a popular site in my site’s niche category.