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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.

Earlier this week I spoke with the people behind Guerra Creativa, an interesting Latin American crowdsourcing community for design services. I learned why it is a creative community more than a contest website, that logo contests are proven to be most successful, and that the community is growing fast with more than 3.400 creatives now.

What prompted the idea behind Guerra Creativa? What’s your vision?

The idea of creating a company like Guerra Creativa came to us when we realized that thousands of companies are getting started in business, needing to create their logos and websites, but not all of them can afford renowned design studios. We believe in crowdsourcing and that’s why we started Guerra Creativa. It gives everybody the opportunity to have access to a service that provides a large variety of quality designs at a good prize.

What has happened since starting up?

Guerra Creativa has attracted more then 3.400 creatives, who already uploaded more than 11.000 designs! We added a community to our platform and every day we’re working on the improvement of our website.

How do you differentiate from competitors like crowdSPRING, 99designs…?

Guerra Creativa offers a world wide community to all our users where they can interact and learn from each other. We are giving every user the power to show the world what they can do, to develop their skills and to have fun, make new friends, and some money. In Guerra Creativa everyone can say what they like, give an opinion or just show their work. We have launched a new section that allows all of our users to get exclusive tutorials, with step-to-step instructions of different techniques and some good advices from our Interactive Creative Director Alberto “Kaiser” Sosa.

We are not just a contest website, we are a Creative Community.

Which design contests are proven to be most successful?

We have seen lots of different contests in Guerra Creativa since it was launched. Till now the logo contests are the most successful, as they attract a huge number of entries and a great amount of proposals within a short period of time. Besides the logo contests, we also see special requests coming in for T-shirt designs and CD-covers.

What have you learned so far?

We had people starting contests from all over the world, like Argentina, United Kingdom, New Zealand, France, Austria, Brazil, Netherlands, Belgium, United States, China and Spain. The main reason for launching a contest on our website is the great amount of high quality designs for a reasonable price.

Our creatives mostly come from Latin America and for them what counts is the combination of learning, getting in touch with other creatives and finding interesting work opportunities. This drives them to Guerra Creativa everyday!

Are you one of those who have never quite managed to set foot into the virtual world of Second Life? Why? Because you thought your ‘first life’ is just about enough as it is and you’ve just never seen the point in spending your time and money to buy virtual clothing and real estate? Well, just a few days ago, I was one of you. Then this commentary is about to open your eyes on how virtual worlds are apt to change the way online collaboration is done and what the future of open innovation is going to look like.

Ever since I had access to the internet I was fascinated by the possibilities of a connected world, laying just a few mouse-clicks away. However, not only has the internet heavily evolved but also has my usage profile of the web changed overtime. From my first homepage to addictively playing online games, from spending a ’second life’ in social networks to business networking nowadays, I dedicated at least a googol of hours to the internet.

Second Life: Technology of the future or a dying hype?

A few trends though passed me untouched, some of which were UseNet celebrities, online casinos - and virtual worlds. When Linden Lab’s “Second Life” went online in the summer of 2003 I couldn’t have cared less. The technology was coarse; especially the graphics were ugly, the inherent social network way too unfocused and the idea of meeting people that substitute their insufficient real life for a virtual life was not exactly tempting. I just didn’t see the point.

IBM employees experienced the phenomenon of 'immersion'

Six years later, this summer in the German online business platform Xing, I stumbled upon a group in which the possibilities of virtual worlds in business environments are discussed. In one of these discussions, Matthias Eichhoff (Director of Marketing at Second Interest AG) pointed out that virtual worlds are more and more becoming a superior surrogate to video conferences for companies. As participants will eventually build up a commitment to the place and its virtual people, meetings in virtual worlds were apt to replace video conferencing and eventually a lot of business travel.
At first I was very skeptical: As long as the virtual characters just plainly stand next to each other with text bubbles popping up upon their heads and now and then performing a pre-scripted dance move, video conferencing will remain the only substitute for “traditional” business meetings. But after reading about IBM successfully holding its 2008 world conference in a virtual world, I was not so sure about that…
The case study states that people waking up in the morning after the virtual meetings felt like they had actually attended a real meeting in which they interacted with others and carried home practical information.

It seems that immersion really does do the trick, even though graphics are coarse and interaction limited. So by that point I was becoming increasingly interested in virtual worlds. In my mind a vision about the possibilities of online collaboration in virtual worlds started to develop. If only the man-machine-interface would be better. If only gestures and emotions could be seamlessly transferred to the virtual world. What makes face-to-face interaction irreplaceable are gestures and facial expressions. To me, this seemed to be the limiting factor. It is not until some kind of hyper-modern sensor, capable of registering complete body movements and facial expressions in real-time, is available to consumers that virtual worlds will become truly invaluable to companies.

Project Natal: Is this what the future of online collaboration looks like?

Yet, in rare occasions, the future has already begun. In June 2009, Microsoft drew major attention to its newest prodigy, Project Natal, on the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2009. The tagline runs something like this: “Leave your game controller at home when you go over to your friend’s house to play Xbox, ‘cause with Project Natal you won’t need it anymore.” That’s great for gamers around the world, really cool…