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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I recently had the opportunity to speak with the Stephen Bailey, the marketing and communications director at Fluevog Shoes about their open source footwear project.

How did the idea for the open source footwear initiative come about? When did it start and what was the inspiration?
For years, when john visited other stores and was on the floor, or even out for dinner people would give him their drawing of their perfect shoe. John lost many of these - so the web was an ideal place to collect them, but also showcase them. It started 6 years ago.

I noticed you mentioned “this ain’t no contest - this is open source footwear.” I’m curious, how you distinguish between the two?
People aren’t competing against each other for a prize - sometimes, nothing quite works for us (but of course may later which is why we keep it all up). Truth is, it’s not the perfect use of the term open source either - but we did get the blessing of the godfather of the real open source which you can find on our site.

It may later? What do you mean?
Yeah, sometimes a shoe is submitted and although it might not work for us at the time, a few years later it fits into one of our lines.

Do you publish all the submissions? If so, why? (I have my hunches, but I’m curious).
Truth is, we turn away very few - we have no request for age, so if a 4 year old submits a drawing, we want it up there. Plus, we are an inconclusive fluevocracy of inclusion. We are the brand owned by fluevogers - if you’re a fluevoger and post a picture - up it goes - it would be unfair otherwise).

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Logoworks is one of the largest logo design firms in the world (acquired by HP in May 2007), and has served over 45,000 small businesses since the company was founded in 2001. I had the opportunity to interview Noelle Bates, the company’s Director of Customer Loyalty, about their “peersourcing” business model, the NIH syndrome, and competing crowdsourcing initiatives.

1. In which way is Logoworks active in the field of open innovation and crowdsourcing?

How Logoworks fulfills on design work is not done by crowdsourcing in the typical sense of the word. We actually call what Logoworks does “peersourcing” because the work isn’t done in the form of a purely open call and the work isn’t done by an undefined group. (Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.)

To explain, when Morgan Lynch, the founder of Logoworks, began developing his business plan one of the things he wanted to do was bring multiple graphic designers to a single project but he wanted to make it affordable to the customer. He figured the way to do that was to develop a network of pre-screened freelance designers who picked up the design projects at their leisure. The design community is not an open community, it’s a controlled entity called “Arteis.” Arteis started with just a few designers and as the customer base grew we were able to grow the design community through referrals by designers already in Arteis; that is why we called it “peersourcing” - all of the designers in our community were and still are referred by their peers. These designers, once accepted into Arteis, are able to log in to the Arteis portal to see what projects are available and then sign up for the projects in which they are interested. They know exactly what is required for the project and exactly how much they will be paid for their work before they begin on the project.

2. The Not-Invented-Here (NIH) syndrome is seen as a common obstacle in open innovation processes. Could you give 3 practical tips to change a company’s internal mindset to a culture of Proudly-Found-Elsewhere (PFE)? How are you tackling this issue?

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