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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Contributed by Anand Chhatpar, CEO of BrainReactions, Chief Editor of BrainWaves E-magazine for Innovation and Idea Generation and founder of the Most Creative People network on Facebook.

I had the chance to interview Dominick Martinetti, CEO of Slappa Distribution, a small but rapidly growing company that is making a great name for itself among DJs and music junkies as an innovative product company. Dominick is an inspiring young man, and I have shared in this article, excerpts from our conversation that reveal his thinking and journey into market leadership.

Slappa has been in business for four years now, and it started with an initial product range consisting of CD cases. It was not a particularly “sexy” business to get into. CD cases had been around for 15 years, and the CD business was not growing aggressively any more. DVDs, computer software and video games still used CD cases, but the margins had been declining for most companies in this space. Also, brands before Slappa had commoditized the product — there was no real choice available to the consumers. Most of the people using these disc cases were forced to not have choices… outside of cosmetic colors, no one was building quality and variety into the cases. Therein lay a problem with CD cases from the consumer’s perspective, which Dominick was able to spot.

To conduct his market research and with an Open Innovation mindset, Dominick went to online bulletin boards and chat rooms for audio professionals like Audiophile, Audio Asylum and Audioreview.com. He sought advice on what these target consumers needed from the ultimate CD case.

Read the rest of this post >

Contributed by Anand Chhatpar
CEO of BrainReactions LLC

The Internet has become a powerful resource for any innovator, and there are a variety of online tools available to help you with various stages of the innovation process.

Let’s go down each step of the process and see examples of tools on the web that can be used along the way:

1. Opportunity Identification
For discovering opportunities to innovate and for finding areas of need and untapped demand, use the following websites:
ePinions.com: Reading consumers’ reviews and complaints about certain products tells you which problems could be valuable to solve.
Inventory.Overture.com: Searching for keyword terms and phrases on this website tells you how many people searched for that phrase and similar phrases last month on the Yahoo network. When you get the number of searches, you can triple it to get the approximate number of total searches worldwide. If you find an interesting phrase that has high searches but not too many websites serving the need, you’ve found a good niche to innovate within.
Trendwatching.com: This website tells you about trends happening in the business world today that you could align yourself with to take advantage of their popularity. Every trend highlights the opportunities for business that lie within.
SpringWise.com: Another great website from the people who run trendwatching.com, which features interesting new businesses starting up around the globe. If you see a successful business in another country that could apply to your country, it is a clear-cut opportunity and you have lower risk because the business model is proven in another market.
Emily Chang’s Ehub: Emily does a great job of cataloging the latest Web 2.0 applications in her Ehub database. Many of these applications have become instant hits with the online audience and one can detect amazing opportunities by looking at the adoption rates of applications like Twitter. Read the rest of this post >