Cambrian House
From Networked Advocacy
Extracted directly from "We are Smarter than Me", pp. 11-13
Canada's Cambrian House entered the crowdsourcing lists in 2006 with a business premise that was complicity itself: The best way to uncover new ideas for software and then pick the winners is to rely on software users themselves. That made for a somewhat startling offer when Cambrian's founder, Michael Sikorsky, was pitching the idea to his first investors. "We don't know what we're going to build, who will build it, or who will will buy what we make," he said. He raised $2.6 million anyway, and the pot has grown to more than $8 million.
Sikorsky's model has worked so well that Cambrian House now has fully 30,000 community members dreaming up ideas, trying them out, collaborating on improvements, compensating each other for their time and work, and buying their final product. Those offerings have since frown beyond software to include entirely new businesses and even some physical goods. The company's guiding question (and answer): "How would you unleash the ideas, talents, and entrepreneurial drive of six billion people? Bring them together under one roof."
Here's how Cambrian House's crowdsourcing model works today.
A member of Cambrian's community...submits an idea. The community members rank it according to marketability and ease of distribution over the Internet. The feedback from the community helps the person who submitted the idea refine his or her concept and determine whether it merits becoming a commercial reality.
Cambrian House also helps highlight the community's hottest ideas in a tournament called IdeaWarz. Sixteen ideas compete head to head in four elimination rounds. Each week, the community votes to eliminate half of the IdeaWarz contestants until a single champion is left. The winning proposal garners funding and fame...
The Cambrian development community of programmers, graphic designers, copywriters, illustrators, and the like bring the concept to life. If it flops, well, better luck next time. If it takes off, the inventor and the members the worked with reap the rewards. As the builders of the platform responsible for helping its members connect and bring ideas to life, Cambrian House allows all those who submit intellectual ideas to maintain ownership of their intellectual property, but it plans to earn revenue by implementing minor transaction fees at some point...and does invest in some ideas.
Determined to work with their community as partners, Cambrian House shares 1 percent of its annual profits with its community (a member co-op board determines how the funds are allocated).
To date, Cambrian House has invested in four crowdsourced products that have come to market.
