Cambrian House began as a
crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digit ...
community that pioneered the technology to tap crowds for the best software ideas. To power open innovation in other businesses, they developed a ''crowdsourcing platform'' Chaordix – the technology to harness a crowd for breakthrough ideas.
Results
Launched in 2006, the original Cambrian House community attracted 50,000+ members and more than 7000 ideas from the crowd.
Weaknesses in the idea-community model included the challenge of convincing users to read and rate a rapidly growing pool of ideas, the relatively low quality of some ideas, the management complexity of distributed development, and the large number of duplicate submissions. These weaknesses have been successfully overcome by other companies including
InnoCentive
InnoCentive is an open innovation and crowdsourcing company with its worldwide headquarters in Waltham, MA and their EMEA headquarters in London, UK. They enable organizations to put their unsolved problems and unmet needs, which are framed as â ...
,
IStockphoto
iStock is an online royalty free, international microstock photography provider based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
History
The company was founded by Bruce Livingstone in May 2000, as iStockphoto, a free stock imagery website supported by ...
, and T-shirt design company
Threadless
Threadless (stylized as threadless) is an online community of artists and an e-commerce website based in Chicago, Illinois, founded in 2000 by Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart.
Threadless designs are created by and chosen by an online community. E ...
.
In the news
Cambrian House has been discussed, primarily in relation to crowdsourcing in a variety of media including: CBC Radio's - The Current, The Financial Times and Economist Intelligence Unit, in addition to new media such as TechDigest and
Mashable
Mashable is a Online newspaper, news website, digital media platform and entertainment company founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005.
History
Mashable was founded by Pete Cashmore while living in Aberdeen, Scotland, in July 2004. Early iterations o ...
.
Cambrian House is also the subject of an eponymous Harvard Business case, which examines and discusses the concept of
peer production Peer production (also known as mass collaboration) is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals. In such communities, the labor of many people is coordinated towards a shared outcome.
Overview
P ...
, the
crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digit ...
business model, and the possibility of using
prediction market
Prediction markets, also known as betting markets, information markets, decision markets, idea futures or event derivatives, are open markets that enable the prediction of specific outcomes using financial incentives. They are exchange-traded mar ...
s to estimate market demand for products.
The company has also gained a degree of notoriety for its unconventional promotional efforts, including feeding 1000 pizzas to Google unannounced, auctioning a celebrity endorsed laptop for charity,
and weighing a goat
References
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External links
Cambrian House
Software developer communities
Open innovation intermediaries