Ideagora, a Marketplace for Minds

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What's more, the pool of talent at their disposal in a marketplace like InnoCentive vastly exceeds what one company could hope to marshal internally.

The second reason is the changing talent landscape. The talent required to lead path-breaking innovation will increasingly reside in locations such as Brazil, China, India, and Eastern Europe, largely because a seismic demographic transition unfolding today places the locus of growth in the global economy (both in terms of consumer demand and the supply of highly skilled knowledge workers) squarely in these developing markets.

Breaking New Ground

What's more, many of the brightest researchers want to work outside the confines of traditional enterprises. P&G figures that for every one of the 9,000 top-notch scientists inside its labs, there are another 200 outside who are just as good. That's a total of 1.8 million people whose talents it could potentially tap into. So smart companies are treating the world as their R&D department and using ideagoras to seek out ideas, innovations, and uniquely qualified minds on a global basis.

Though today's nascent ideagoras have yet to reach eBay-like proportions, companies such as InnoCentive, yet2.com, Nine Sigma, and YourEncore have planted the seeds for a sea change in innovation. They could arguably spur even more profound changes if services such as InnoCentive looked and behaved a little bit more like the open source software community.

For the time being, InnoCentive solvers don't naturally coalesce into large groups focused on collaborating to solve a single problem. Nor does InnoCentive offer the openness and transparency of open-source software. Seeker businesses can cloak their identities, and solvers may never get personal credit for their contributions.

InnoCentive's new Chief Executive Officer Dwayne Spradlin, however, is keen to increase contributor activity and loyalty by addressing these issues. Spradlin plans to ignite more "viral" behavior among seekers and solvers by expanding the tools available to users to manage rights, communicate with other registered users, and self-organize into ad hoc freelance organizations. "Think 'government research retirees' or 'Chinese nanotechnologists' or 'ABC Corp.'s contract research partners,'" says Spradlin. "Then envision engaging those groups in specific challenges of interest to them."

Coder Vs. Coder

Indeed, where innovation problems are highly integrated, it may be preferable to offer problems to skilled external teams rather than, or in addition to, posting them in an open market. Imagine, for example: FEMA seeking ready-made solutions for housing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or the city of Los Angeles seeking help to reduce traffic congestion on its highways. The fact that InnoCentive structures its problems in a modular way already means that there are opportunities for individuals and organizations to build a business around this model of innovation.

Another company staking a claim in the new global marketplace for ideas is TopCoder, which organizes some of the world's largest computer programming competitions. Such competitions have been around for decades, but growing worldwide demand for exceptional talent has upped the ante and competitions have been growing in size and frequency as a result. Google's (GOOG) recent "Code Jam" attracted 20,000 participants from 143 nations, up from 14,000 in 2005.

Starting March 6, 2007 and running for several months, Microsoft (MSFT) and BT Group (BT) are using TopCoder to run a "mash-up" competition to encourage developers to merge telecommunications features such as voice and text messaging with Web-based applications such as mapping and search. Winners can grab prizes ranging from $2,500 to $25,000.