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.

Tapping into the minds and ideas of crowds to source knowledge on trends and future developments is an important aspect of crowdsourcing, an aspect which we call sensing. How can one effectivily sense new demands and opportunities?

Philips for example, has launched two sensing platforms: Lead Users and Live Simplicity. Philips is a dutch multinational, offering technology products for lifestyle and healthcare sectors. On Leadusers.nl (dutch website) they conducted studies with lead users on specific topics, like video technology and sleep quality. The initiative was thus aimed at gaining knowledge on the specific subjects as well as sensing new product demands and opportunities.

The new Live Simplicity website is partly a marketing instrument to promote Philips’ Sense and Simplicity slogan, but definititely also a tool to acquire knowledge on what people think in Philips-relevant areas of life. The sensing platform facilitates discussions in 6 areas (Business, Communication, General, Internet & Technology, Lifestyle & Social, and Wellness). Each discussion starts with a short description and two contrasting viewpoints (A and B). Visitors are invited either to vote for a viewpoint, or register as contributor and write a comment. The initiators also thought of incentives for contributors and have set up a rating/reward system. Each contributer has a rating, shown as an icon. This is calculated based on how many times that contributer has made a point and had others agree or disagree with it. Each posting has an agree/disagree button next to it, and the combined results of these are displayed in the Rating. So contributors can develop themselves as respected members of the site. It must be said, although one may expect otherwise, the reactions and opinions on the platform are indeed of high quality. In addition, high-rating contributers are often selected to contribute to certain discussions. Philips has also developed a visual tracker, which enables contributors to track their favorite topics from their desktop.

As one of the leading companies with respect to Open Innovation in general, Philips now provides a leading example of how a large multinational can sense new ideas and preferences from lead users (leadusers.nl) and large crowds (livesimplicity.net). One to start and expand in other B2C industries.