Crowdstorm: The Future of Innovation, Ideas, and Problem Solving

Chapter 10

Choose the Right Online Space

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

—Arthur C. Clarke

A rocking chair that charges smartphones. A new kind of cardboard packaging that includes instructions on how to turn it into something else when you’re done with the packaging. An innovative mapping service that lets cyclists in Berlin pick the best bike routes. These are some of the ideas that are regularly sent out to Springwise subscribers.

Springwise collects promising entrepreneurial ideas from over 15,000 spotters, its community of innovators spread around the world. Each day, spotters send in their ideas via e-mail or online forms. Then a core team at Springwise’s London headquarters compiles the ideas, which an editorial board assesses to determine which ones will make it into their e-mail newsletters.

Springwise uses its website and e-mail list of 155,000 subscribers to generate awareness—the first step in our Participant Decision Journey for engaging with potential participants. Each newsletter contains a call to action to join the network. But this organization has other ways to generate awareness—including their more than 50,000 Twitter followers. Additionally, Springwise.com generates a good amount of search traffic thanks to their publicly accessed content (about 15 percent of their traffic is based on publicly available data). And because Springwise.com provides a constant source of unique entrepreneurial ideas, it is often linked to other ...