Interested in Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing?
Follow Open Innovators on twitter or subscribe to the Open Innovators RSS feed!

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.