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 >

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A lot is beeing writen about tapping into the wisdom of the crowd. It is less clear however, where entrepreneurs and companies can find that wisdom. Spigit, a newly launched platform, might present some opportunities.

Spigit is a platform that provides professionals the ability to showcase new ideas and innovations and in the process build their professional network. Companies and Entrepreneurs can obtain feedback-contributions-ratings from employees, partners and customers. Through our proprietary simulation they can build and refine an idea, find the right resources to contribute, create buzz, and calculate a multitude of targeted metrics to provide insight into viability and simulate the likelihood of success. Contributors can also earn credits, build a network, and win the spigit Splash! Award based on their credits.

The platform allows ideas and concepts to evolve and emerge through participation and contributions of a diverse audience, which perfectly fits the new Open Entrepreneurship trend. Of course, you can only post ideas, new products, or services when you are comfortable with publicly contributing them. On the other hand, it is not yet clear to me how large, established companies can benefit from spigit.

Conclusion: one to try out for entrepreneurial minds who want their ideas to be peer reviewed. Video: Spigit presented at AlwaysOn Stanford Summit