10 Best Collaboration / Innovation Tools on the Web

Tim Ferriss provides these excellent examples of creative use of the web to support innovation and collaboration.

1. X PRIZE Foundation (www.xprize.org): The X PRIZE focuses on designing and running incentive competitions in the $1M – $30M arena focused on solving grand challenges.

2. CoFundos (cofundos.org): cheap and really good platform for the development of open-source software.

3. Genius Rocket (geniusrocket.com): solid crowdsourced creative design agency composed solely of vetted video production professionals producing content as a fraction of the cost of a traditional ad agency.

4. Amazon Mechanical Turk (mturk.com): popular and powerful crowdsourcing platform for simple tasks that computers cannot perform(yet), such as podcasts transcribing or text editing. There are also companies, like CrowdFlower, that leverage Mechanical Turk (and similar tools) for even more elegant solutions.

5. Innocentive (www.innocentive.com): one of today’s best online platform for open innovation, crowdsourcing and innovation contests. This is where organizations access the world’s brightest problem solvers.

6. UTest (http://www.utest.com): the world’s largest marketplace for software testing services.

7. IdeaConnection (www.ideaconnection.com): open innovation challenge site for new inventions, innovations and products.

8. NineSigma (www.ninesigma.com): open innovation service provider, connecting clients with a global innovation network of experts.

9. Ennovent (www.ennovent.com): worldwide expert platform seeking solutions for sustainable development in energy, food, water, health and education in rural India.

10. TopCoder (www.topcoder.com): the world’s largest competitive software development & creative design community, with over 200,000 at your fingertips.

How Do You Think About the Future...try MindTime Maps

In the daily grind to execute strategies through project-based work, it may seem like the future is too far to matter, especially when innovation is the goal..  A recent study, Future Quotient, provides insights and frameworks that help leaders think how the world will be different in the future, whether for you employees, your customers, your partners.

Future Quotient, co-authored by Volans and JWT, introduces the Future Quotient (FQ), which is designed to measure our ability to think and act along inter-generational timescales.
The report also included use of a really nifty and innovative technology from my friend, John Furey, CEO of  MindTime Technologies.  Their technology enables you and your team to create powerful MindTime maps. These are designed to help groups and organizations develop a greater awareness of how thinking about time is shaping and driving people’s roles, decisions, attitudes, and much more.
A simple 2-minute quiz locates people in the world of thinking™. Everybody learns how their thinking is driving their perceptions, communication, and relationships. When you create a MindTime map of your group or organization, you can expand your insights into how thinking is shaping it all by choosing from a menu of pre-prepared surveys on a variety of topics (brand allegiance, innovation, leadership, happiness, etc). These are offered to participants at the time they map their own thinking and results are shown as correlations between thinking archetypes and participant’s responses. See how you and your time rate in thinking about the future at MindTime Maps