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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After attending the National Council for Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer (NCET2) Conference last week in Washington DC, it is clear that universities are stuck while the world is moving quickly past them. Closed, entrenched processes are restricting universities from adopting open innovation. The question the conference was trying to answer was, “How do we utilize our campuses, tech transfer offices, and discoveries for entrepreneurship?”

Today, university tech transfer offices operate like a filter, only promoting works they deem financial viable. If it has some value in their eyes, then they get to work patenting the discovery, advising that faculty member to incorporate, or trying to license the work. This process is one giant disservice to the university as it restricts what works get into the public domain for the world’s benefit. The Bayh Dole Act of 1980 said that universities can take ownership of works that are funded by the federal government. By filtering the works that make it out of universities, tech transfer offices are only shooting themselves in the foot by limiting potential, financial returns. The more open a university is with its works, then clearly the higher the chance someone will try to utilize that work. Welcome Open Innovation!

For universities to spur entrepreneurship, they must welcome open innovation in a dramatic fashion. Pushing faculty to start businesses, I believe, is not the correct route; welcoming entrepreneurs and companies to utilize their works is. To help this, the Kauffman Foundation and Science Commons are working to create a streamlined, open tech transfer environment with:

The iBridge Network, out of the non-profit Kauffman Foundation, allows university faculty and administrators to post innovations for others to find and utilize. iBridge allows universities the public venue to promote their works. So instead of acting as a lens, tech transfer offices should instantly post works in iBridge (think of it as an online store for university innovation). Science Commons aims to write generic license agreements for universities to utilize. The whole processes today is crazy, to write a new agreement every time a technology is licensed. Science Commons, a subsidiary of Creative Commons, is streamlining the last kink in the chain.

For universities to spur entrepreneurship, adopting iBridge and standard licenses is a must. Open Innovation is knocking on their door and its time to let it in!

Emile Petrone

epetrone (at) knowble.net

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 >