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How the Crowd is Identifying Products in Web Images

Oct-30-12 By IdeaConnection
You may well be familiar with the problem. You are surfing online and see a picture of someone wearing an item of apparel that you quite like the look of, say a pair of jeans or sneakers.

You want to purchase them, they must be yours soon, but there’s no indication of how much they cost, the brand name or where you can buy them.

Divorced of their context, because the images are not linked back to their source you pound the keyboard in frustration. But those days are gone now, and it’s all thanks to the crowd, and a new website called CrowdSend.

How to Have an Original Thought

Oct-29-12 By IdeaConnection
There are no hard and fast rules about how to generate creative and inspired thoughts, though one of Einstein’s musings is a hot favorite:

“To stimulate creativity, one must develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition.”

That’s one way, and of course there are many others. If you’re stuck in a rut with a brain on temporary hold refusing to come up with an original thought, here are a few simple ideas to get it fizzing and popping back into action:

Don’t Ignore Your Employees When Engaging the Crowd

Oct-29-12 By IdeaConnection
Open innovation rightly focuses on external sources of knowledge and bringing the outside in, but that doesn't mean avoiding engagement with your employees. You ignore them at your peril. There are a number of reasons why it’s smart to involve internal intellectual resources with your open innovation efforts.

Here are three of them:

Crowdfunding the Future of a Sports Star

Oct-27-12 By IdeaConnection
There’s no doubt that the London 2012 Olympic Games inspired millions of children and young adults to get active, and perhaps one day step up on a podium to collect a winner’s medal. But ambition, ability, and determination are only part of what goes into making a top athlete.

The other key ingredient is funding. Would-be stars of track and field need financial support so they can concentrate full-time on their training.

In these lean times sources of finance are hard to come by, but a new crowdfunding initiative may be making it easier.

Crowdsourcing a Country’s Constitution

Oct-26-12 By IdeaConnection
It’s an intriguing way of running a country – actually ask the people who live there what they would like to see happen. The concept may have some politicians who think they know best wailing and gnashing their teeth, but not in Iceland.

Europe’s most sparsely populated state is crowdsourcing the constitution, drawing on suggestions from Facebook and Twitter about how the country should work.

Crowdsourcing Tool to Find New Uses for Drugs

Oct-24-12 By IdeaConnection
It is not unusual to see promising new drugs and therapeutics stall during the development stages. This is obviously an expensive and potentially financially crippling state of affairs as the costs associated with developing drugs are astronomical.  If they don’t end up on pharmacy shelves that’s a lot of invested dollars that haven’t been realized.

But a new tool may be able to help pharma companies out of these difficulties, and it’s based on harnessing the wisdom of the crowd.

A Healthy Dose of Inspiration with Quotes about Ingenuity

Oct-21-12 By IdeaConnection
Get the week (and your brain cells) off to a flying start with these pithy, insightful and revealing quotes about ingenuity.

“The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.”
Marcel Proust

Key Ingredients to make Your Crowdsourcing Challenge a Success

Oct-18-12 By IdeaConnection
A crowdsourcing challenge can be a powerful way to harness external expertise to solve internal R&D difficulties, develop existing products, and generate new ideas.

Though simple and elegant in concept a challenge can be counterproductive in practice without organization, planning, and the following key ingredients:

GSK Opens its Doors Wider to Tackle Global Health Issues

Oct-15-12 By IdeaConnection
Pharmaceutical giant GSK is one of open innovation’s biggest cheerleaders with extensive engagement with external expertise. But there’s still more that it wants to do towards greater openness, transparency and collaboration.

According to a press statement GSK is going to expand its open innovation activities to speed up research and create better drugs to help tackle global health issues.

Open Innovation Can Save Britain’s Future

Oct-15-12 By IdeaConnection
Innovation shouldn't be a closed shop. That’s the message that comes out loud and clear from an article in yesterday’s Observer newspaper in the UK.

Writing about his belief that Britain’s future lies in a culture of open and vigorous collaboration, Will Hutton extols the benefits of co-creation and the pooling together of resources.