Around one month later than previously announced, crowdspirit went closed beta. The result is from the first point of view relatively sobering. In the following a short description of the functions so far.

User present their product ideas - others rate and comment them - that’s it for the most part. All further process steps like funding and product development are not yet working. A market place much similiar to the concept of CambrianHouse was added a few days ago. In everything offered so far, Spigit is much more developed. The question arises what the founders of Crowdspirit have done for the last half year since they announced the concept of the platform. Not a bulletin board more for ideas, the world doesn’t need necessarily.

We’ll see what they’ll make out of it. The beta tag awakens hope and hopefully we’ll get a promising user generated product and maybe even the Facebook-Phone.

Nowadays there are very few web-entrepreneurs using the power of what Joseph Schumpeter described as creative destruction:
“This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It
is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to
live in.“ Joseph Schumpeter

Sometimes the ordinary needs to be destroyed to clear the path for new things. One central momentum of this process is playing with existing solutions - to recombine them in a totally new way later on.

The guys behind Spigit have made that by providing a rich playground where people can jointly test, promote and improve their business ideas.

Spigit is a newly launched community that aims to provide a network of support for start-ups and their founders.

The simulation engine provided by spigit is a way to sort of test out your idea. The simulation runs through three stages, where approval badges are awarded for things like buzz percentile, number of views, and expert approval. Completion badges are awarded at the end of each stage, enabling ideas to graduate to the next level. Several data points are considered for the simulation engine, including the tracking of dynamic interaction on the site. Spigit’s simulation benefits carry over into the virtual stock market as well, where “spigits” can be traded to determine the market value of a particular idea.

As a participant in this community, you don’t have to be testing out an idea. You can provide value by offering feedback, interacting with others on the site, and helping the idea to either gain traction or lose steam. This wisdom-of-the-crowd approach can be useful when prepping ideas for real world implementation, but the structure of spigit allows for experts to be created and relied upon for the cultivation of the community. So users get badges in the same manner as ideas. You can also support or deny an idea, write a review, offer up resources, or add it to your watch list. (via Mashable)

We`re excited by the idea and looking forward for the first spigit-startup becoming a severe player.

A few weeks ago, Steve Poland officially started the ambitious project Ringside Startup to develop, fund and market a startup with the participation of the crowd. A few days ago, the attempt was given up because Poland had failed his expected goals in funding. From our point of view, however, the idea is still interesting and the question remains whether it is possible to launch a startup by collaboration of networked individuals.

We always thought of Open Entrepreneurship in this manner - if such a project succeeded, it would support our idea of the creation of wealth in networks. At the moment we often have to focus on focal networks in our research, giving the creative crowd the possibility to act as micro-entrepreneurs without any risk because the focal center is providing all critical business processes. A crowdsourced startup however would change the game essentially: the decentralized contributors would define, develop and control the whole process. In order to reflect on the failure of Ringside, we would like to highlight the most essential steps of the project.

22 March - Launch of the project

“I’m raising $20,000 in reader/sponsor contributions to launch a web start-up. Contributor participation entitles you to vote on actual business decisions — the first of which will be which idea that I’ve exposed via Techquila Shots will be the web start-up I build from the ground up. I will blog about this entire journey as openly as I can — taking you through the entire start-up process (beginning with incorporation — whether to be LLC or S-Corp Inc; in Delaware or NY) and providing feedback from VCs to Entrepreneurs along the way. My hope is that we’ll all learn quite a lot about the start-up process from this experience.”

26 March - Introducing different business ideas

Poland introduced 5 community concepts and asked the crowd: „Which one of these ideas do you feel has the most potential for ‘success’?”

4 April - The end of the journey

“I don’t believe at this moment that I can raise the contribution size I have been hoping to raise ($10k minimum; $20k goal). My belief was that I could get tons of entrepreneurs that are very interested in the entire start-up experience. […] Well, we’re still going to get to hear that valuable insight – only, I’m starting a venture now. I’ve aligned with a programmer that believes in one of my ideas just as much as I do. Thus, we’re moving forward on it.”

In our opinion, the Ringside project failed because of its setting and predefined conditions. Poland wanted to engage people to donate money instead of providing shares with the possibility to make at least a small profit. The incentive to donate money to a startup only to see what happens with it, seems to be not enough. If Ringside had been a success, the only winner would have been Poland himself, holding all property rights. Collaboration, however, is about true contribution and an advantage for all people involved in such a project - and who should therefore benefit from it as well. As the crowd obviously made clear to Poland by not contributing in the intended way, collaboration is not about standing applauding on the ringside watching the protagonists inside the ring. And it is definitely not about one single person only using the crowd.

David Beisel, an early-stage VC usally gives valuable internal views on the startup scene, but this time he got it strait to the point. On Genuine VC he posted his experiences about the copycat phenomenon and how entrepreneurs surprisingly working on the same business idea without knowing each other.
He also announces one cause for this effect:

„Information about new startups and trends affecting them is near ubiquitous given the rise of influential and well-read blogs, as well as the mainstream press and conferences. And based on these visible and salient market trends, smart people tend to be led to the same conclusions about wherein lies the opportunity.“
So he believes „the risk of another someone literally copying an entrepreneur’s startup idea is largely overperceived and overweighted.“

In the manner of Open Innovation the idea itself, has literally no worth at all, not untill the idea has succed to switch onto the market and therefore transforms into an innovation. The challenge is to maximize probability that this switch happens.

„Defensibility with other aspects of the business model and above all, execution, mean so much more than a few months time-to-market.“

„The question when pursuing a new idea for a business isn’t “has someone else thought of this and how can we prevent that from happening?” but rather “how can we beat someone else who is thinking of this right now?”