Gogme.biz is a new Singapore based start-up and takes on the challenge of putting Entrepreneurship 2.0 into practice. Gogme stands for Globally Owned, Globally Managed Entreprise. How does it work? When registration opens, anyone can contribute $100 to the start-up capital to become co-owner of new start-ups together with other aspiring entrepreneurs. All co-owners will collectively make business decisions through internet voting (community decision-making), decisions which will then be carried out by real life business staff in Singapore and other Asian countries. Through a business blog, the local Operations Manager will report about the daily business activities and challenges faced.

Co-owners from all over the world can visit their staff, their offices and their shops in Singapore. Gogme will also create 3D avatars of their staff, and 3D models of the offices and shops in Second Life. With a target of 50,000 aspiring entrepreneurs by the first year, they estimate to raise about $5 million worth of start-up capital. Entrepreneurs will collectively own the start-up capital and the legal cognizable ownership stake of the business entity through the country’s business registrar. 100% of the profits derived from the business ventures will be distributed to the co-owners proportional to their initial start-up contribution.

Conceptually Gogme is quite similar to other initiatives like MyFootballClub, but with a unique focus on starting-up and running a business. There are a lot of TBCs (To Be Clarified) at this point, and problems like “free riders” are always around the corner in this kind of set-ups (especially if the reward is proportional to the initial contribution and not to the effort of participants!). Let’s first see how fast they can reach their targets (3,000 pledges - 50,000 entrepreneurs), and let’s go from there as far as selection of business ideas, start-up of new businesses, and actual management is concerned. There’s definitely a longer way to go compared too more focused concepts like nvohk (community-managed clothing), and therefore chances to succeed are considerably lower in my opinion. Anyhow, it’s yet another new, interesting initiative in the growing field of crowdsourcing.

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On February 26-27, the 2nd annual Open Innovation Conference was held at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Darin Eich was there for Open Innovators and blogged about the conference. To roundup, a list of Darin’s posts:

• Attending the Open Innovation Conference
• Live from the Open Innovation Conference
• Great day at the conference
• Insights And Themes From Presentations
• Sources of Innovation: Where do ideas & innovation come from?
• How Really Big Companies Open Innovate
• The Need for Innovation Teams and Internal Consultants within Organizations
• Becoming an Open Innovation Partner with Large Companies

Thanks Darin! I hope to be there too next year.

About 3 weeks ago I sat together with Andy Zynga, CEO Europe of NineSigma. For those that may not know the company: NineSigma is an open innovation intermediary that matches the technology needs and questions from companies (referred to as Innovation Seekers) with the possible solutions from a huge network of scientists, university researchers and technology incubators (referred to as Solution Providers). As such they directly compete with other intermediaries like Innocentive, TekScout and YourEncore. NineSigma claims to have the largest amount of Requests For Proposals (RFPs) on its platform and thus to be the market leader. Their clients include companies like P&G, Xerox, Kimberly-Clark and DuPont.

I had a very nice chat with Andy Zynga about their expansion strategy in Europe (NineSigma is headquartered in the US and has already expanded to Japan with a local office there). In order to broaden the current client base in Europe, they are now building up a European Office in the area of Louvain (Belgium). On average NineSigma plans to double its business year by year as more and more companies are adopting this kind of open innovation initiatives. If you are interested in their services or just want to know more, references to the newly founded European Office can be found here.