5 Reasons Kickstarter is Not Just for Nonprofits into the Arts

by Lisa Thorell on March 12, 2012

Kickstarter, the online crowdfunding site for creative projects, continues to be much in the news. And with the upcoming and highly anticipated U.S. House passage of the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act it only  promises to get more so. Having successfully funded over 11,836 projects in 2011  - from innovative mobile apps, video documentaries , to uber [...]

{ 2 comments }

Kickstarter: Poised to Go Supernova in the CrowdInvesting Age?

by Lisa Thorell on January 3, 2012

You can feel the ground trembling. Is Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site where projects as diverse as artistic efforts, venture and nonprofit causes raise money, about to go Supernova? Maybe it’s the fact Kickstarter has already succeeded in attracting over one million people to pledge more than $100 million since it’s launch in 2009. Maybe it’s [...]

{ 1 comment }

Consumer-Innovators (Part 2) & The End of Social Media 1.0

January 3, 2012

  In Part 1 of this series, I described how Social Media campaigns and programs may be unwittingly compromised by a villain residing below: The Industrial Age relic of a one-way product design flow. I also reviewed Eric Von Hippel’s recent work on the surprisingly immense number of consumer-innovators  in the population, suggesting social media programs [...]

Read the full article →

Of Skateboards, Consumer-Innovators & The End of Social Media 1.0 – Part 1

January 3, 2012

Who should read this post: If you regard crowdsourcing customer ideas as a separate and optional evolutionary branch of social media. Who should not read this post: If you’re already exploring or planning to crowdsource customers ideas. Ever notice how we  tend to stay safely inside our chosen paradigms? As Frank Beach, the biological psychologist, [...]

Read the full article →

Open Innovation & Impatience: Start Innovating Already

January 3, 2012

A few months ago I was asked to do a keynote address on Open Innovation and Branding. So this post is basically about that keynote titled:” Start Innovating Already: A Punk View of 13 Poisons to Open Innovation”. It’s intended for new-comers to the field. There are several mounting market reasons why Open Innovation is [...]

Read the full article →

Four Roles for Marketing in Open Innovation

January 3, 2012

(This post is mostly directed to small companies. Larger companies may well find my observations self-evident and part of their best practices. That’s all the more reason why small companies partnering with large firms should take heed.) Whether driven by the new “hyperinnovation economy”, shrinking product lifecycles, increasing competitive pressure from developing nations, it’s clear [...]

Read the full article →

Crowdsourcing + Open Innovation Fuel a Prize-Driven Economy (part 2)

January 3, 2012

In an earlier post,  I gave a precis of McKinsey’s “And the Winner is…”, a comprehensive study of the $2 Bn  incentive-based prize market. I also described  the March White House initiative to encourage contests promoting open innovation among federal agencies. Here I continue my summary describing some of the business efficiencies associated with prizes [...]

Read the full article →

Crowdsourcing + Open Innovation Fuel a Multi-Billion Dollar Prize Market

January 3, 2012

(This is Part 1 of a 2-part posting.) One of the fabulous things about the internet and this era of user-generated content, social platforms and collaborative technologies is that they have made us keenly aware of the many talented people out there. It’s silo-breaking, allowing us to identify and access the genius talents of individuals [...]

Read the full article →

Six Marketing Lessons of the NetFlix Crowdsourcing Experiment

July 1, 2010

Here we follow up on the marketing highlights of last week’s post on the $1 Mn NetFlix Prize announcement. Why did the NetFlix Prize attract so much attention? Here’s one reason. At a time when many companies are still afraid of social media   –  here’s NetFlix crowdsourcing their engineering knowledge, offering up customer data, [...]

Read the full article →