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Commercializing Collaboration |
Announced at TED last week, kluster is the latest start up attempting to channel the collective wisdom of the web into commercial value. Modeled after incentive-based innovation labs like InnoCentive and Cambrian House, kluster assumes that people will want to be incentivized for their participation in product development and business ideas.
For Ben Kaufman, 21, kluster’s founder, the idea to develop an online collaborative community grew out of his own experience conducting a contest for his iPod accessories company, Mophie, which he subsequently sold. Rather than judge final submissions, Kaufman used the website to refine designs and vote on the winner. The result: Bevy, a key chain and bottle opener built into an iPod Shuffle case.
From our perspective, the greatest challenge with kluster may be the method for choosing the best idea. Rather than relying on the most popular, Kluster uses algorithms to make decisions, “as each user’s successes, failures, reputation, areas of expertise, and overall history are considered,” according to the company’s website. Will Kluster make the innerworkings of this algorithm transparent to participants, particularly when cash compensation is the prize? We look forward to joining Kluster and learning more about this crowdsourcing experiment.
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BY JEN
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