ideaphore llc

Introducing Ideaphorum ideation contests

Ladies, gentlemen, ideators, ideities, tech lovers, and gadget freaks listen up. We’re ecstatic to announce the launch of the next step in our vision for ideaphore, our open (crowdsourced) innovation powerhouse. We’re calling this new feature ideaphorum and you’re going to love it. Ideaphorum lets all kinds of companies list ideation contest campaigns where they can gather ideas to solve specific issues, generally improve their product or messaging, and anything else one can get creative feedback on. They offer prizes for the best ideas and, when their contests end, we help them choose and announce winners.

But that doesn’t even come close to fully describing what we’re building. There are badges and eureka buttons and so much more. Earn opportunities to work with companies directly, participate in fun early testing projects, or even develop your own product. Check out our explainer video (2:11) to get the full picture and then head over to ideaphorum.

We will also be running fun internal ideation contests like our “Phuture Phorecasting” competition, where we ask you to imagine up some products from the future. All these contests help you build an ideaphore profile that shows companies that you understand a specific market, product, or industry.

We hope to see you on the site often competing and winning contests. You might just win a Eureka button – an opportunity to bring that huge “next big thing” idea that you’ve been sitting on to market and strike it rich. We’re counting on it.

ideaphore Upgrades

We are excited to announce three upgrades we have made to ideaphore based on your invaluable feedback and ideas: Ranks, Badges, and Private idea storage.

You now have a Rank and Badges on your ideaphore business card. These are designed to help your ideas stand out to companies. Your Rank represents your level of participation in the community — including posting ideas, upvotes, and voting on other members’ ideas. All users start with Rank “Beginner.” As a Beginner, all ideas you elect to share must be free and open for the world to see and use. As you rank up, the terms of your idea transfers shift more in your favor.

Badges represent awards you have won for achievements on ideaphore and for winning ideation contests. They indicate proficiency or insight in some particular art or field.

For trying out our site in its very early stages, current active members will be promoted to the “Early Adopter” Rank. This tells companies that you like to try out new technology early, which you clearly do. Just our way of saying thanks. You also get a sweet new Badge that we like to call “Early Bird Gets the Gold:”

We are also excited to bring you private idea storage. For those million dollar ideas that you want to keep for a later date (perhaps after you rank up) or just ideas that you want to keep to yourself for the time being, you can now store them privately. Take all your ideas with you, sort and search them, edit them, and show them off anywhere you have an internet connection, including your mobile device. Easily share some of your private ideas with the world when you are ready. Just click “Save private idea” instead of “Share” when you are done inputing your idea:

We can’t wait to hear what you think of these improvements. Tell us what you think of the new logo too. And as we artfully hinted at above, there are many more upgrades coming your way really soon. If you want another hint, follow us on twitter.

Check Out The New Digs

Top Free Ideaphore Ideas – October 2015

Hi ideapholk,

We are excited to see so many of you posting really creative ideas. Here are the 8 best free ideas from October.

If you use a free idea from this list, or repeat it somewhere, make sure that you give credit to the original author. And if you want to work with any of the authors to build an idea they’ve posted, contact us – that’s what we’re here for.

Congrats to all the users who’s ideas were chosen this month. Our most prolific ideator (idiety?) from last month, Jhebner, has this month’s top idea. Also, he’s still the most prolific…🚀 Stay tuned for a special ideaphore contest coming in December.

an idea for an #engineer, #app, #gadget: a trackpad dedicated to creating legible digital flash cards for students – posted by Jhebner

Flash cards are a great way to organize your thoughts for study. But if the handwriting isn’t legible or if you lose a card, the utility demonstrably decreases, no? Jhebner suggests that if students had a dedicated device (trackpad or maybe a digital pen) solely for capturing handwriting and organizing it into legible digital flash cards, they would be more organized in their studies. It would be quicker if a device was dedicated to that action. I concur.

An idea for a #3DPrinting startup business that proposes “it’s not what you’re printing with, it’s what your printing around”. – posted by steveorst

3dPrinterComp

I like to call this idea “crowdprinting.” Steve proposes that a 3Dprinting startup can focus on selling something other than the plastic material fed into the printer. When making customized gadgets, there is still plenty of stuff tht 3D printers can’t print, like batteries, connectors, and touchscreens. A large group of people could agree on a basic design for a gadget they all want, then the startup could source the unprintable items in customized shapes in bulk. Individuals buy a packet of the required unprintable parts for their new gadget. That way, a crowd of people can take advantage of economies of scale for the unprintable parts and still get individualized products from their 3D printers by customizing colors, designs, and flourishes. Where do I sign up?

An idea to build something into bandaids that helps reduce swelling and pain; #bandaids, #firstAid – posted by mom2cubz

Oh, this idea is just so cool (couldn’t help myself). One of those icepacks that you crush to activate right in the bandaid. Someone draw this.

An idea for @SpritzInc to use their fantastic speed-reading-for-everyone api to help people actually read those unbelievably long User Agreements – posted by steveorst

Turns out Spritz is already working on this and you’ll be able to read their whole site, including their user agreement, using Spritz again soon. Check out spritzinc.com.

An idea for @Yelp that proposes a “strike while the iron’s hot” change to the UX for better customer retention – posted by idea_man

Get those customers posting reviews while still in the moment by including a QR code on the check.

Dual age ratings on children’s toys for #Toys #ToyCompany – posted by mikameeks

Is there a way to get advanced toys for your older child that don’t pose a choking hazard to the younger child in your house? Well, there should be!

An idea to cut out the middleman in advertising for @MobileAppDeveloper – posted by Jhebner

Further blurring the line between employee and customer. I love it.

An idea to improve the ironing board experience @IroningBoardCompanies – posted by Jhebner

This idea has a lot of potential. Maybe high-end hotels can just make this part of their appeal, a fresh, washed ironing board cover.

Top Free Ideaphore Ideas – August 2015

Hi ideapholk,

Here’s a collection of the top free ideas posted on ideaphore in August. These are free ideas, so you are free to use them. If you do use them, or repeat them somewhere, make sure that you give credit to the original author. And if you want to work with any of the authors to build the ideas they’ve posted, contact us – that’s what we’re here for.

Congrats to all, especially user Jhebner for grabbing three spots in this month’s top picks. Here they are in some particular order:

a new way to give tactile feedback to wearers of robotic prosthetic limbs for#Robotics #Prosthetics @Bebionic @HDTglobal – posted by jonniedarko

Fascinating. Instead of trying to change sensory information into digital information, just move the physical sensation from the robotic side to the nerves on the remaining limb. It’ll take some getting used to, sure, but might be worth it. JonnieDarko attached the above drawing of a robotic hand with hydraulic actuators at the finger tips and moving paddles at the other end, which attaches to the remaining limb. This is a great example of an ideaphore idea. Anyone have the means to test this out? Any prosthetics users out there think this might work?

An idea for @iFixit to make screw-organizer repair maps. – posted by OmegaMan

I really like this idea. I make one of these whenever I do a repair with a lot of tiny screws. My drawings are usually crude and confusing. But the system works. It would be much easier if ifixit made it. They already take the devices apart and they probably draw a lot bette than I do. Maybe they can make a free version available on the site that you could just print and punch your own holes in for one-time repairs. Or they could sell pre-punched corrugated cardboard for people who do the same repair often. OmegaMan didn’t post a picture, but here’s a photo of one of my old screw organizer maps from a macbook pro repair I did a while ago. If I could buy one of these for my frequent repairs, I would.

An idea for a better breast pump for @medela, @ameda, @evenflobaby – posted by mom2cubz

Include a rolling mechanism in the flanges? This makes all the sense.

#EnergyDrink “Blinker Fluid.” – posted by Jhebner

A funny name for an energy drink that uses a run-on gag from the automobile world. “See?” they’d say. “It does it exist.”

Advanced sidescrolling business profiles for sponsored results on @Google. – posted by Jhebner

If I were you Google, I’d contact this guy ASAP.

An idea for a complete multi-zone heat and cold therapy helmet for #Migraine Treatment – posted by ekaw83

This should exist. Why does this not exist yet?

An idea for a cool twist on the reason we have coffee in the mornings for someone to use in a #coffee #advertisement – posted by steveorst

People love a twist. Maybe get M. Night Shyamalan to direct it. If you want to use this idea, I suggest you work with steveorst, he could come up with some more good “getting ready for work” tropes I bet.

An idea for a puncturable pouch of mouthwash under a disposable coffee cup @Listerine – posted by Jhebner

There are just so many options that come to mind when you read this idea. Listerine could perhaps partner with starbucks and throw one of these under their cups or even just attach a breath strip on the side. Well done.

An Example Ideaphore Idea for YouTube

Suppose I was sitting around with my friends or family binging on YouTube videos together on a computer when an idea struck me that would make the experience better.

I do not want to build such a product or patent it myself. I don’t know whether it would work or how they might implement it. It’s just a bare idea. Instead I want my friends to vote on it and for YouTube to consider trying it out – I want it to exist so that I can use it. And I want to get credit online for having suggested it (props!) even if YouTube was already working on it. Or maybe YouTube is running a contest over social media to gather feature ideas and giving out prizes (hint hint @YouTube). Where could I post such an idea where YouTube’s lawyers won’t be afraid to let their engineers look. Now I can post it on ideaphore and then post an ideaphore link on twitter or facebook directed @YouTube. That way, both YouTube and I agree before they see the idea on the terms under which my idea can be viewed. Now my friends can view it and vote on it to tell YouTube whether they also would want this feature.

In this case, I am posting my idea for free, dedicated to the public for YouTube and anyone else who sees it to use freely. https://ideapho.re/ideas/32-youtube-google.html Who else wants a feature like this?

On https://ideapho.re, I post an idea “for:” @YouTube @Google “that” I call the “YouTube Rotary” which makes sharing videos easier and more fun. The “idea is:”

YouTube should have a “rotary” feature where a group of people can share videos they love, taking turns. Each person can select a playlist and their videos play to the whole group one at a time. This can be done locally or over the web.

Locally, a group of friends would sit around a tv (e.g. with chromecast), a computer screen, or their phones and binge-watch YouTube videos. This could be automatically detected by the youtube app if, say, multiple people are casting to one device over wifi. Each person would create a queue on their phones with the ability to add and remove videos. Each person’s videos are played from their queue either on the common screen or on the screen of the individual phone who’s turn it is. In the latter version, everyone would sit around in a circle and take turns pointing their phones to the group. “OK watch this trick shot, it’s epic.” Of course, there could be the occasional permitted override that goes something like “OOH OOH, I know one we HAVE to watch after this, it’s just like this one but better, let me skip ahead.” Maybe limit “skip aheads” to 2 or 3 per hour?

Over the web, multiple people (even strangers) can enter a “theater” where certain kinds of videos are being played by other users in that room. This can be based on a theme or a general theater created just for friends. In the theater, individuals can watch videos in that theme, comment in real time, and add their own suggestions to the queue. All videos selected by participants are played equitably so everyone gets a turn but perhaps weighted toward first to arrive and higher user rating.

Here are a few more ideas for the implementation of a theater: A “skip” button on everyone’s screen could be used to monitor whether a large number of people in that theater want to skip the current video. Rooms should be limited by content rating – not allowing videos rated higher than the threshold – with the rating threshold displayed near the link for the room. There could also be “showroom theaters” where only one youtuber gets to select the videos played. Artists could use this to debut albums in real time with their fans meeting them in the theater at a set time. Or a sports venue could use it to post and play instant replays to augment an ongoing television broadcast. Videos in a showroom start playing for everyone as soon as, and in the order that, the “projectionist” adds them to the list.

Perhaps YouTube could acquire one of the startups that are trying features like this already such as watch2gether.

Anecdotal Discovery

When in the thick of solving a problem with your product, it’s easy to forget to check if your users have already solved it. After all, tradition dictates that you arrive at work, lock the door behind you, and commence creating. But that was before the internet – before people could make a public record of their at-home product improvements and share them with the world. Chances are, if your product is not meeting the needs of many of your customers, someone out there already fixed it. Some examples you say?

Louis Plante had cystic fibrosis. One long-term treatment for his disease was a long and uncomfortable ordeal to clean the lungs that was aptly called “lung clapping.” One day, Louis found himself ruining a rock concert for everyone in his general vicinity by coughing violently whenever there was music playing. He left early. He was disappointed that he didn’t get to see the encore, so naturally he dwelled on it. Pretty soon, he realized that he had been sitting close to the speaker and this was forcing him to expectorate without a machine punching him in the chest. His discovery was purely anecdotal. But if it works for one person, maybe it could help others. It’s at least worth a look.

Though there are many other examples in the medical field, it is by far not the only field with user-driven innovation. From modifying your Model T, to snowmobiles, to mountain bikes, open source software, and everything in between, it is human nature to improve things to solve problems. The technology to share our DIY projects gets better every day and this will become much more pronounced with the encroaching expansion of 3D printing. The ability to experiment and improve will shift to the user. If you were to believe someone like Eric von Hippel, the current shift from producer driven to user driven innovation is a business paradigm shift the likes of which we have not seen since the industrial revolution.

From peer to peer, this sharing is as easy as social media. But how do companies get access to crowd ingenuity? This movement of ideas is slowed and complicated by intellectual property laws and the difficulty of searching for and identifying worthwhile feedback, from lead users.

At ideaphore, we are lowering the cost to transfer ideas by simplifying the transaction. Imagine, open innovation available to everyone; customer development on demand. By removing high cost barriers, we let ideas move from individuals to organizations faster and earlier in the ideation process than ever before. Our suggestion box is better and more powerful because companies can determine the quality of suggestions proposed by an individual before looking at any of their ideas. And individuals have greater control and understanding of the terms under which their insights can be viewed by a company. We give companies the opportunity to listen to their best customers.

Join us in innovating open innovation by registering at https://ideapho.re.

The Complete Product

For most early startups, it is not possible to release a complete product on day one of launch; a complete product being one that has all of the features the customer would need and expect. Everything on a customer’s checklist.

But who knows what a complete checklist like that even looks like? On day one, a startup makes several guesses and releases what they think is the minimum viable product. A startup cannot build out the entire list. Mostly because they don’t know what that full list contains, especially if they are entering a new market or attempting to disrupt an existing one. And they don’t have the money to risk building out the incorrect guesses. Even big companies embarking on new ventures tend to have these problems. Only one person really knows what the complete product looks like. The customer does.

It turns out that something amazing often happens when early adopters begin to take a startup from early and nameless to viable and known. Those early adopters take it upon themselves to build the complete solution on their own. That is, they string together and combine tools and services they already have to fill in any gaps. They might use dropbox to sync an app across their devices. They might download a third party application that augments or compliments some feature that the startup provides. Or maybe they are using post-it notes.

If you can get them to tell you all the things they did, you can begin to build the features or partnerships that will make your product a complete solution to their problem. ideaphore is here to help you to make that connection with your customers, get that insight from them, and use it in your product. Staring at your website analytics will give you very little insight into what other solutions customers have combined with your product. Our solution to that: Just ask them and reward them for sharing with you.

Click here to sign up for updates and to play with our BETA.

Thomas Jefferson Talked Pretty

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

– Excerpt from a letter sent by Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson dated 13 Aug. 1813

The Noyce Principle of Minimum Information

In 1968, Robert Noyce, Andrew Grove, and Gordon Moore founded a little company called Intel. Each of them had their own approach to business, research, and innovation. Moore is known for coining Moore’s law. Grove is known as one of Steve Jobs’s idols and for meticulously managing the company into a 4,500% increase in market capitalization over his tenure. Noyce was the visionary. Noyce, nicknamed “the mayor of Silicon Valley,” was the one in the lab pushing intel’s engineers past all of their preconceived boundaries to make the world’s first and best microprocessors.

Noyce had a unique way of solving problems. He believed there to be two available ways to test an idea or solution. The first he called the “pretty” method. This was the traditional method most research engineers knew. It entailed building out sophisticated machines to fully build and fully test the idea to within a closely controlled confidence tolerance. The second, the one he preferred, was considered by some the “quick and dirty” method. It became known as “the Noyce principle of minimum information.”

Summarized by Noyce, the “[m]inimum information principle attempts to guess at what the answer is to a problem, and then goes back into the science only as far as needed to see if that guess was right or not. If this does not solve the problem, one makes another guess, and then goes back again.” This principle became the prevalent method of solving problems at Intel. It makes perfect sense. If basic science tells you that there is a very small probability that an idea will work, you move on to another. If it tells you that there is a high likelihood it would work, then it is worth pursuing further. In this manner, fewer ideas need to be run to ground before a solution is found.

This method of problem solving made intel agile. Everyone is aware of Intel’s innovation speed. They are the unchallenged pace car for computer processor speed and power increases. The minimum information principle provided Intel with two main benefits in testing new ideas. The first is speed. It allows a company to go from ideation to testing and back to ideation much more quickly and frequently than the “pretty” way. This way, a company gets a working solution sooner and off to market faster. The second benefit is that the company does not generate a lot of useless scientific data and intellectual property that they would never otherwise use in the marketplace. This means less wasted resources and fewer floundering business units that need to be spun off – a mistake Xerox PARC is famous for.

Open innovation is the perfect fit for the minimum information principle. Open innovation allows a company with an existing base of researches and developers to open up momentarily, gather ideas from outside, and go back to the science just long enough to see if the idea is likely to succeed. This makes it less dangerous and more rewarding to brainstorm – to create and to find more ideas.

Remaining closed makes you slow. No matter how many talented people you have working inside your organization on a given problem, statistically there will always be more people that can do it just as well, or better, outside of your organization. When asked whether open innovation makes the R&D process shorter or longer, Helmut Traitler – Nestle’s Vice President of Innovation Partnerships – said “Shorter, obviously. You find people who have talents and resources outside. That’s what I said. If you bring people into the team that can help you to solve the problem faster then you are in the marketplace much earlier than if you did it all on your own.”

ideaphore’s mission is to help companies explore new avenues for open innovation, to efficiently use the ideas they get from the outside world to build their products and services, and to build relationships with their customers by starting that two-way conversation. The minimum information principle is but one tool in a giant arsenal of innovation methods that we can help companies apply.

Reach out to us on twitter @ideaphoreLLC if you want to talk open innovation.

Click here to sign up for updates and to play with our BETA.

WANTED: SOMETHING FOR NOTHING

We consistently get three types of feedback for ideaphore.

The first is resounding excitement. An outlet for creativity that lets you build up credibility in a community and sell your ability to ideate – the product of your inspiration – for money. It’s an exciting new platform for open innovation.

But we also get outright hatred for our stance that people should be able to sell access to their minds. We get visceral disdain for thinking that inspired thoughts and the work product that goes into fleshing out an idea, big or small, can be sold on an open market.

This second, arguably negative, sentiment breaks out into two diametrically opposed views: (1) ideas have no value; and (2) ideas are way too valuable.

To the first group we say, “you get what you pay for.” It is a self-fulfilling prophecy that all ideas are valueless. If you believe your customers’ and potential customers’ ideas are worthless, then you will not pay for access to those minds. Your product will be made and updated in a vacuum. Beyond your own internal ideas, the ideas for product improvement that you do find out in the ether will be only the ideas, or portions of them, that people are willing to give away for free. It’s funny to hear people say that ideas are a dime a dozen. Where’s the bloody dime then?

To the second group we say, “get over yourself.” Ideas are indeed plentiful and are generally not, on their own, revolutionary. If you can do some preliminary research as to whether the idea has been tried before and which specific company could benefit from the idea, then the idea might have some value. If you can apply your expertise to the idea and spend time explaining the problem and the solution and why the company should care, then that work combined with your idea can be marketable. But a company still has to put an expert in the field on the idea, decide whether it’s good, make it work, and then put it on the market taking responsibility for it. They are taking all of the risk. For small ideas, you should not necessarily expect a piece of the pie.

We believe that an open market where idea creators choose a fixed fee for viewing their idea and work product is the correct solution for selling small ideas.

The modern suggestion box has to be so much more than a box. It must be curated by a community, backed by a algorithm for the feedback and a ratings system, complete with rewards and recognition for the idea creators, sealed with IP protections, simple, and beautiful. ideaphore is that modern suggestion box, and our growing community will make us much more.

WANTED: VALUABLE IDEAS AND THOSE THAT VALUE THEM.

Author: ideaphore llc