Creative Marketplaces

I'd like to use this week's blog post to hypothesise about the potential for "Marketplaces" in creativity.


Let me explain:  There's a huge buzz around the world about Open Innovation at the moment.  This is the rather loosely-defined practice of exposing parts of your organisation's innovation process to external influences which can (fingers crossed!) bring fresh ideas.  Everyone's experimenting with inviting selected partner organisations to contribute ideas, usually under a carefully constructed non-disclosure agreement.


I'm sure this sometimes works, but perhaps there are better models ...


Why not cast our nets wider, by adopting some of the practices from crowd-sourcing?


Why not define the necessary tasks more clearly?


If it's ideas were after, why not advertise the need for specialists to fulfill certain thinking tasks en route to innovation, notably:


1. Problem or opportunity definition and scoping
2. Idea generation
3. Translating business goals into idea assessment criteria
4. Performing assessments and iterating ideas
5. Modelling benefits and proposition development


Freelancers could apply, but so could organisations with complementary skills or capabilities.


Payment, where appropriate, might take the form of an exchange or job swap, instead of cash.


There are already "out-tasking" outfits operating in the internet, such as "Payperhour.com" or https://www.minutebox.com/, albeit for freelancers only.  Could that kind of model work for tasks in organisational creativity too?


So here's my public commitment:  Should my company bonus actually materialise next month, I'll out-task this blog for a week, and see what happens.  Watch this space.


As usual, I'd be delighted to enter into a debate, in the hope of improving my insight.