Nintendo announced today that it’s giving the crowd a chance to develop video games for the company’s successful gaming system, the Wii, and sell them over the WiiShop channel. The new initiative is called the WiiWare program, and is expected to launch early 2008.

It is not yet clear what kind of tools and templates Nintendo will provide for the WiiWare program, but for people with a great game idea but little time, money, or energy to go through traditional development and retail outlets, this could be a significant opportunity. Nintendo has been the one to watch lately. Its market cap briefly passed Sony’s earlier this week, and the Wii continues to trounce the PlayStation3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in the marketplace. By tapping into the creativity of the crowds, Nintendo could have a nice low-risk, high-margin business on its hands with WiiWare. It will be interesting to see whether and how Nintendo will succeed in providing the appropriate tools and platforms for users to easily create their own video games. As video gamers will probably be very enthusiastic about the program (and mostly very familiar with internet and computers), the user-friendliness and the provided freedom will be the key success factors.

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We recently featured Fellowforce as a new intermediary platform for companies to crowdsource solutions and innovative ideas from outside their organizations: Fellowforce - Open innovation & problem solving. Today they launched a challenge of their own, which is actually quite interesting: “come up with a memorable tagline for Fellowforce, and get 1% of the company’s shares”.

The challenge outline: propose a oneliner that inspires ‘fellows’ to participate, co-create and innovate with companies worldwide. The tagline should be memorable, to the point and straight to the core of the Fellowforce’s service for fellows. PLUK, a consumer services company, also offers 1% of its shares in the country organisation to the ‘fellow’ that comes up with a country specific implementation strategy and introduction with the required business partner(s).

The success of the platform will largely depend on how fast their fellows community can grow in the coming months, and whether they will succeed in guaranteeing a certain quality to companies. At this moment, I think that the Fellowforce platform has a lot of potential. One to keep an eye on for managers and entrepreneurs.

We will be hosting a carnival on open innovation & crowdsourcing in July for which bloggers and writers can now submit their articles (submission form).

What is a carnival? A carnival organizer assembles interesting blog posts and articles on a given topic, and then puts all those posts together in a blog post called a “carnival”. Consider some examples: example one, example two. Carnivals are a great way for bloggers and writers to recognize each other’s efforts, organize articles around important topics, and improve the overall level of conversation in the blogosphere. Carnivals come in edited “editions”, just like magazines or journals. The fact that carnivals are edited (and usually annotated) collections of links, lets them serve as “magazines” within the blogosphere.

Bloggers and writers can submit relevant articles for inclusion in the upcoming edition. The carnivals provide a nice aggregation of recent posts by bloggers on a given topic, and the host provides a level of editing and annotation that helps readers find posts they are interested in. Writers who submit their articles to blog carnivals are rewarded with traffic and exposure for their blog posts and articles.

Submit your blog article to the upcoming edition of Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing! Use our carnival submission form, or email the link to your article(s) to carnival@openinnovators.net!