Developing Innovation
Yahoo recently announced that they will be closing Brickhouse by the end of the year.
http://www.crunchbase.com/product/yahoo-brickhouse
Brickhouse is a division of Yahoo where approx 4-6 people work for 4-6 months on a short term project, hoping to create something new and exciting.
Obviously, it didn’t prove it’s value. Yes was a good idea in “theory” but it is often difficult to force something to happen, vs letting it happen.
Ideas just strike you, and there are a lot of lightening strikes that hit everyone. Usually it has to do with an experience that happens to them and in turn they come up with a solution.
Whether it succeeds or not depends on the persons execution, and other business factors such as, is it big enough, timing, competition etc.
Innovation comes from everywhere and people of all different skills and backgrounds. Many don’t make it for various reasons but the key is, people try. Something is bound to work its way to the top. These become companies like Facebook, Myspace, Craigslist, Youtube and Twitter to name a few.
VC’s “spray and pray” and hope that an idea that sounds good, will make it. So home growing your own, is difficult.
I like the competition aspect that Amazon and Facebook took.
Facebook created fbFund, a $10M seed fund focused on enabling innovative and engaging applications on Facebook Platform.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/fbFund/40962810690
“We provide the following benefits:
* Funding: Receive $25k-$250k non-recourse grants
* Mentorship: Learn best practices and receive valuable feedback from Facebook engineers and other fbFund developers. Get immeasurable benefits that come with introductions to potential investors.
* Marketing: Receive press attention at f8 and Facebook Developer events.”
This competition just recently closed and it resulted in a number of innovative ideas for Facebook. The money provided incentive to build something (building things are cheaper these days) and gave Facebook users more applications to play with. Making the Facebook experience better for its users is key to growing and maintaining interest.
In the case of Amazon, they recently closed a similar competition for companies using their development products/services. http://aws.amazon.com/
In both cases, great ideas developed, the best rose to the top.
The next big thing is coming, from where or what this will be we’re not exactly sure, but it will. You can’t develop innovation, it just happens.
Tags: fbfund, innovation