Crowd-sourcing. Online, offline, both...

One of our members sent around a link to a new IDEO project called Open Ideo. It is basically an online crowd-sourcing platform intended to surface solutions to various social challenges. In short, a "challenge sponsor" comes forward with a social/environmental challenge for which they need help solving. The call goes out to the Open Ideo online community by way of a "challenge brief", and then proceeds through four steps: Inspiration (brainstorming); Concepting; Evaluation; and Winner Announcement. The Challenge Sponsor can then choose to fund the development of the winning idea. Very cool idea...

I am sure there are many comparable platforms out there, but the one I am familiar with is the work of a former CSI Member, Innovation Exchange.  Their model, with its own distinguishing characteristics, basically works the same way. However, Innovation Exchange focusses on the corporate sector - bringing crowd-sourcing to commercial problems/opportunities.

The Centre for Social Innovation is planning to launch a new social innovation program in 2011 that is in part predicated on crowd-souring methodologies. We're adopting a "city innovation" lens, meaning the challenges we will take up are those facing Toronto or urban centres in general. We believe that the talent to solve the problems facing our city resides here, and that we've done an inadequate job of tapping into the potential of our communities. We're still in the early stages of developing our approach, but we do know that brainstorming, citizen engagement and 'competition' will be part of the process.

The thing is, we intend to test our methodologies in the physical world. The two examples cited above exist virtually - which is extraordinary and clearly something that couldn't have been done even a few years ago. But I personally find the tools and bit cumbersome and awkward at times. We are really interested in how crowds can solve problems when they are physically co-located. And we're also interested in how we can use the virtual and physical worlds together to  catalyze the crowd-sourcing (idea development) process.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on great processes that either demonstrate crowd-sourcing in the physical world or which blend the online and physical worlds. We're trying to wrap our heads around different methodologies in order to understand their potential for addressing different issues, in different circumstances.  I've been fortunate enough to attend a Social Innovation Camp, which does a fine job of crowd-sourcing solutions. I'm also aware of emerging Corporate Innovation Camps and large scale competitions. But we're hungry for more! We know these methodologies are just emerging and have incredible potential...

If you have ideas on how we can apply crowd-sourcing tools in interesting ways, or if you have access to case studies or resources, we'd love to hear them... leave a comment or send me a note and we can get the process rolling...