Hack:
Community Enterprise

By Alexander Polonsky

July 18, 2011 at 9:35am

crowdsourcing

Moonshots

Embed the ethos of community and citizenship

Enable communities of passion

Build "natural", flexible hierarchies

Summary

Wouldn't it be great to get a crowd of experts to invest a bit of time in your enterprise in an effective and meaningful way, especially when traditional investment is too costly or simply not available?

The idea of enterprise crowdsourcing is in the air, but for now it mostly remains an elusive futuristic utopia. Yet, all the components are already there to make it a reality.

Problem

Lots of people have ideas about starting a company. It is well-known, however, that such ideas are very difficult to turn into reality. The vast majority of startups fail not because the idea was bad, but because the necessary resources and expertise were not available.

On the other hand, there are lots of people who have some free time, money, and interest to invest into a startup that they believe in. It could be just a few hours a month and a few hundred bucks, but such resources can be more than sufficient if enough people invest. For this to happen, a new conceptual, legal, and technological platform needs to be created.

Solution

State of the Art

Creation of such a platform is not a simple matter, but things are made easier by several related projects and experiences. These include:

Open collaborative platforms / projects such as open source projects (e.g., Open Office), content communities (e.g., Wikipedia), or social games (e.g., eRepublik).
Legal frameworks for sharing intellectual property such as open-source licenses and Creative Commons.
Financial and investment platforms for monetary exchange between individuals and groups, such as Zopa and FriendsClear.
Cooperative administration structures such as Scop in France.

The challenge is to put all these parts into a complete easy-to-use solution.

Business model

Such a project is best developed in the context of a commercial enterprise. The business model behind such a company could be based on a mix of:

Startup-targeted advertisement
Usage fees for projects that reach a certain level of maturity
Selling the collaboration platform to existing enterprises.

Business structure

It would be natural to structure such a company from the beginning in the spirit of what it is trying to achieve, i.e., by inviting as many members as efficient to contribute to the project. Since the right platform is not available at this time, the openness of the project from the beginning will have to be limited but can increase in phases as the platform is developed.

Practical Impact

Once the Community Enterprise platform is available, it would provide a rich alternative source of investment to all kinds of startup projects, for profit or not for profit. It would also be used by existing companies to raise investment from individuals or to distribute internal resources more effectively.

Community Enterprise would do for time investment what microfinancing did for monetary investment.

In addition to the resource aspect, crowdsourcing can add the extra dimension of "the wisdom of the crowds". Finally, a Community Enterprise would naturally tend to be more democratic and agile than the traditional enterprise structures.

First Steps

At the beginning, a core team would have to put together the most critical aspects of the platform into a prototype that would allow the project to launch. Such a prototype could be assembled by a quick & dirty integration of already existing pieces of the puzzle.

You need to register in order to submit a comment.