Say there is a system that allows everyone to submit their own ideas for new products and people can vote which of those ideas are best. The top ideas are decided by the entire userbase and not by a few set of individuals. Great idea and will mostly nail down the top ideas right? IMHO, Wrong!
Here is the reason why I think it doesnt work. Now, say there are a million users in this system, the more the better right? Let’s see. Say each day there are 10 ideas submitted. Then all the million people can vote against those 10 ideas and the system is bound to pick the top ideas. That’s not a problem. But instead of 10 ideas, imagine there are 100 ideas submitted. Increase that to 1,000. Increase that to 10,000. You get the picture, it’s simply not possible for anyone to review more than a handful of ideas a day. It’s not the number of votes that a person can cast within a time frame that matters, but the number of ideas that one can really read, understand, digest and comprehend the novelty of the idea and see the bigger picture of how it may have a great potential.
So, what’s the best way to solve this? I don’t think there is a simple answer. One approach is to allow people to have friends and followers so that your friends will read all your ideas and definitely vote. But there are multiple problems with this approach. First, because they are your friends, they may just vote. Second, not everyone has the time and interest to gather a big social network.
All the above I am talking about is regarding a cool company called Quirky. They are definitely pioneers in the crowdsourced product development but I think there is a lot of scope for evolving their platform.
I don’t claim to solve the problem I am mentioning above, but I think the following is likely to work much better. Say, there are 10,000 ideas a day. Instead of displaying all the 10,000 to the million users, display just 10 of the latest per user and make them vote. Based on this, pick the top set of ideas from this list and make them available again for voting the second day as a separate set. As time passes (with the limit of 30 days), fewer and fewer ideas will bubble up and only a small set of ideas are presented to each user. This will make everyone to carefully review the ideas that they are presented, real top ideas will eventually bubble up as they get more exposure by end of the 30 days.