Campbells soup wants your ideas

There’s an ideastorm brewing at Dell

Starbucks wants to shape their future with ideas from outside their walls

There’s clearly a trend here, the question I have is: how long do these companies have before their “idea pools” become efficiently organized outside the org, in their own space on their own terms?

Campbells maybe pays $5,000 if they convert your “idea” into IP

Couldn’t find anything specific within the ideastorm community nor buried in the legalese of the Starbucks initiative.  Interesting to me is the salesforce.com technology driving both Dell & Starbucks.

I think that this will play out on a case by case basis-for the time being.  Dell & Starbucks clearly have enough passionate and involved members who appear (and likely) do participate for intrinsic reasons + they really have the masses organized into a sense of community.  People contribute and share for creative fullfillment, belief, affinity/obligation, reputation, and credibility.  And of course people contribute and share for financial & monetary reward…which is the next step in this game.

My prediction is that as the leaders, influencers, genuine ideators – those proven successful – will separate.  They will embed themselves into a much more functional role within the community and possible even the org.  They will earn income, ownership rights, profit sharing, and become an integral factor within the companies and organizations that they contribute to.  They will replace overpaid executives because their results will prove to deliver more value at a fraction of the price.

In fact, I noticed this one submitted just a few weeks ago:

Until now the participants in Dell IdeaStorm community are rewarded with points for their activities and good ideas but these points are worth nothing.

I think it would be great if the points that people gather here would be exchangable for Dell discount coupons!!!

Yeah.  It’s coming!

But- what service will serve as the platform for these idea communities?  Who will represent the individuals and the masses and how will that contract look like? How will the traditional corp heirarchy look in 2 years?  And the “org chart”? How about 5?  Will we have major corporations whose major shareholders are the collective crowd?  Ineresting stuff indeed…

According to co-founder Steve Newcomb: ““I started looking at activism as a potential start-up industry”.  Right on Steve!

“Virgance’s role is to find campaigns that it can help to succeed through a four-pronged support strategy that Mr Newcomb says draws heavily on the way in which Barack Obama motivated and managed his activists.”

The four pronged support strategy includes a potent blend of:

• volunteer network on the ground level
• social networking initiatives
• word of web from blogosphere
• leveraging youtube as a distribution platform

“Carrotmob is suitable for paid sponsorship by firms that want cause-related branding,” according to the article.

Another option they’re exploring is creating a socially driven venture fund open to microinvestments–what an outstanding idea.

“Mr Newcomb says being a for-profit company enables it to grow faster and achieve more social impact than a non-profit, because it can afford to pay its employees competitive salaries and can raise capital from investors, rather than relying on donations.”

This reasoning makes sense, especially from a budding social entrepreneurs perspective.  Ironically, I’m in the middle of forming a legal entity and have toiled with for-profit vs. not for-profit.  It seems that the NFP format has failed to evolve with the market; it’s current structure is too limiting and cumbersome to serve the very goals it aims to achieve.  As a result, we’re about to enter a completely new space in American business: the for profit built on a foundation of social responsibility-a completely innovative hybrid of profit and social value.

In short, I believe that part of the solution to rebuilding our economy is to create more corporate transparency while re-establishing  corporate social virtues/intentions.  Trust is in very short supply and the next generation of start-ups that can address the inadequacies of the full-fledged profit based outfits that have been running the show (into the ground) for last era of business are poised to benefit as the tide turns.   The pendulum will swing back the other direction at an accelerated rate due in part to the networked effects of the web.

Some questions worthy of exploration include:

What other companies, outfits, initiatives, orgs, and people also share similar thoughts and outlooks?

Although this concept is relatively new to the US, are there other business cultures in other parts of the world that are also pioneering the cause?

This is a fascinating time to be in business.