Our fearless leader, CEO Christian Cotichini has a saying, “if anyone knew how this was going to work out, it would already have been done.”
In other words, all the great innovations look obvious in hindsight. Take a look back at Kickstarter, Indiegogo, even the original X Prize, where we trace our own lineage.
These seem like obvious solutions now, but when those sites were getting going, everyone thought they were crazy and stupid, and a total waste of time.
And so the company had to thrash around trying different ideas until they found the one that stuck.
They had to find innovators willing to take a risk on the platform, and help create the right features through their day-to-day needs of trying to get work done.
We’re still a long way away from figuring out the right way to implement crowd-sourced innovation.
Here’s the basic premise: there’s got to be a way that the crowd can come up with clever ideas to solve problems, big and small.
I hope most people will agree with us there. There’s got to be a way.
Now, which way? Which features? Which incentives? Which limitations?
I honestly have no idea.
And that’s why we’re doing experiments. Does it work best if we let people choose a funding goal? Should we let people define a deadline for their challenge? Should we force them to define a deadline?
Should we prevent people from posting challenges without pictures or videos? Or should we just encourage it?
And can we solve some of these problems by doing the things that don’t scale? Like helping people create better challenges? Or running webinars? Or writing helpful articles?
Again, not a clue.
But once you admit that you have no idea how you’re going to tackle a problem, you can approach it with humility and open-mindedness. You can explore various ideas, keep the ones that work, throw out the ones that don’t work.
And best of all, you can listen intently to the needs of your community.
As a crowd-sourced platform for innovation, at the very least, we should get great and seeking innovation from the crowd.
Got any ideas? Drop me an email at kyla.
Image credit: It’s a trap, by Kara Hansen/Flickr
