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Eva Missling is the founder and CEO of 12designer GmbH, a young company based in the heart of Europe, Berlin. After more than 8 years in the design industry, she currently uses her experience as founder of an online marketplace where customers with design demands meet the right creatives to get the job done; it doesn’t matter if it is about naming, slogans, logos, websites or multimedia clips. Quick facts about 12designer.com: more than 7400 registered creatives, 1100 accomplished projects, 250.000 € business volume and available in 5 languages - English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

1) Which 3 main trends does 12designer.com tap into?

First the idea of crowdsourcing itself, that remains to be understood in a practical way by many of our main targets, start-ups and SMEs. The delegation of tasks to the crowd is translated concretely, in the case of 12designer, into a platform where customers can obtain creative solutions, such as logos, flyers, websites, multimedia clips, or naming, slogans, and more. Then, our online roots make internet the natural place to deepen the tendency of building relations and achieving results through it. Taking into account that we are a young and small company, too, we also understand our customers as partners. Third, we offer a real enhancement of cost-effectiveness for entrepreneurs, by giving them the ability of having more professional solutions than those given by their nephews or neighbors, for a price that they can pay. It is about bringing new people to a market that virtually didn’t exist before, not only on the side of customers, but also of talented designers that are starting their professional careers.

2) What is your unique selling point in the market (compared to 99designs, crowdSPRING, etc.)?

Compared to our main competitors, I can mention some advantages. For instance, we offer more than just design projects. Start-ups looking for a name can do an online XXL brainstorm session with us, in order to find the right one. Sound and multimedia creations are also possible: radio spots, computer games effects, screencasts and webvideos, all that can be done on our platform! We support 4 more languages besides English: German, Italian, French and Spanish. It means that, despite a geographically united world under the internet, we are able to reach out groups with different cultural backgrounds, and, as a major European crowdsource marketplace, we do understand European client needs better. Finally, and most important, we keep a close contact to them and our creative community, what has ensured a level of satisfaction that we want to keep in the next stages of our development. If there is someone out there not satisfied, I’ll be happy to be in touch and talk about any shortcomings that may have happened.

3) Which challenges have proven most successful? Why?

The most successful? I would say the launch of 12designer itself. We had a demand much higher than we thought just in the beginning of everything, when we planned to maintain for a while a German version only. We realized, though, that it would be our chance to develop further and launch a Spanish and English version for the website, which happened only two months after. With that, we would give a worldwide channel to our platform and also tap into the market of my sponsor Grupo Intercom, Spain. We became market leaders there in a matter of a couple of months.

4) What is your revenue model? Do you plan for other revenue streams?

We have recently introduced a Freemium model, after a completely free period gave the platform credibility. It has been a success so far. Right now, we have the free 12basic option, that limits the number of participants of a project to 12, and 12plus, paid, with unlimited participation and advanced options such as privacy. A 12premium project option is also on the way. As this will keep us busy for the next months, we don’t plan to have another revenue stream in the near future.

Try it for free: To strenghten their positioning as start-ups’ partner, 12designer is going to offer on the 15th of July the possibility for everyone  to create projects with advanced features for FREE. No fees will be charged. An excellent opportunity to try it out!

I am keen to share with you these interesting insights from Pepijn de Visscher, President of Brainrack.com. Pepijn shares the vision, learning points, positioning, and revenue model behind his new crowdsourcing platform, which launched its first challenge in March 2010. Brainrack is a crowdsourcing platform that allows creative students to support organizations by providing fresh and innovative ideas.

1) What’s the vision behind Brainrack?

The vision behind Brainrack stems from the fact that many great ideas remain unutilized for two reasons: First, there is a general lack of portals where people can go to submit their ideas. Second, organizations rarely ask people to come up with ideas. People and companies alike share a tendency to keep problems to themselves. The consequence is that only a few people are then aware of the problems companies have, hence any potential solutions remain unutilized. Many great ideas never see the light simply because organizations don’t ask for it, often not even their own employees. Look at this Wall Street Journal article on how idea generation should be done. Brainrack’s vision is to create a portal for organizations, which allows for them to open up to smart ideas.

2) What have been the largest difficulties Brainrack experienced?

Our biggest problem has been persuading organizations that it’s not embarrassing to share some of your problems or challenges with the world. Companies often consider it weak to ask the crowd questions like “What new market should we pursue?”. They are concerned that people will think that they can’t solve their own problems, or that they have no clue about what market they should enter. I question the validity of this reasoning though. It is no secret that every company is looking for new markets to enter and one good idea could be of extraordinarily value. In fact, it should be considered a strong and innovative sign that companies are seeking alternative ways to gain inspiration and ideas.

3) How do you position Brainrack in an increasingly dense market?

By taking a niche. We focus on students whose ideas consist of 3 or 4 pages. Generally between $3,000 and $9,000 in prize money is distributed amongst the winning innovators. The average time to compose a winning idea is around one or two nights of work. We consider our range of prize money to balance well between affordability for companies and fair compensation for the winning students.

4) What is your revenue model? Do you plan for other revenue streams?

Currently we charge $99 plus 25% of the prize money. We don’t differentiate between customers. We consider ourselves relatively affordable in contrast to some of our competitors which charge $10,000 - $15,000 per challenge. We prefer to aim for the Fortune 5,000,000 rather than the Fortune 500 (inspired by ReWork, written by the founders of 37Signals). We have some plans for future revenues, but as of now we aren’t quite there yet.

5) What has been your biggest/most unexpected learning point so far?

“Niche first, world later”, an excellent quote from Drew Houston (Founder Dropbox). I wish I ran into that quote 6 months earlier. When we started, we focused basically on everyone. The philosophy we share is that “out of the box” ideas come from unexpected places, therefore everyone should be targeted. By focusing on students, it would technically violate our philosophy since it implies that you automatically ignore other market segments, but there is simply no other way. Seeking a niche is the only way to build a business.

What are the main trends in innovation? Mark Turrell, CEO of Imaginatik, shares his 10 predictions.

1. Innovation involves more than just R&D (seriously!) – Companies like Wrigley may have pioneered this, but it is clear that the best companies realized a while ago that R&D is only one aspect of innovation, not the be all and end all, and often not even the driving force. Growth often comes from innovation in new channels, new packaging, business models and so on – and it makes no sense to treat innovation as a single-function business activity, hidden away with the scientists in R&D.

2. Not enough invented here so look outside – We may still have cultural challenges to overcome in looking outside company walls to bring in new inventions and methods, but companies really don’t have a choice anymore. The pace of change is too rapid – and no firm can hire all the best people. Open Innovation is here to stay.

3. Experiment with Collective Intelligence and crowdsourcing – Expect to see an ever-increasing number of firms applying crowdsourcing internally and externally to address a variety of problems, from new product development to sustainability. The path has been set for expansion!

4. Ideas are precious so manage them – With Gartner predicting that Idea Management will be mainstream in two years, it is time for companies to effectively manage ideas and idea generation rather than relying on heaps of Post-Its and random spreadsheets. The methods and tools exist to do it properly, so companies in 2010 will really up their game in this area.

5. Innovate the Innovation Process (and do it properly for a change) – All companies innovate in some way. Some do it way better than others. Top firms have been experimenting for 10 years with online consumer insights, new means of doing rapid prototypes, and new physical environments to trial and test innovations in realistic scenarios. There are still too many firms jumping on to simplistic, fancy sounding innovation bandwagons, without thinking through the implications. So we’re expecting more companies to change the way they are innovating, and to spend more time putting in place proper systems to do so.

6. Innovation with full-time staff… – It is remarkable how many firms do NOT have full-time staff working on innovation. Firms have 50-person six sigma teams, and 25% of a person’s time to drive innovation. That does not make any sense – and has been proven not to work over the last five years. Companies therefore are moving people into innovation full-time; more and more are doing so to manage the process of innovating.

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