Thursday, June 04, 2009

A Marketplace for Creativity?

BootB is a new website with an interesting premise: a marketplace for creativity.

Some users ("Builders") go to the BootB in search of creative ideas. Builders might be anyone: Fortune 500 companies, start-up entrepreneurs, artists or writers looking for inspiration, anybody. They write a project description, offer a fee for the best idea, and post the description.

Other users ("Creatives") go to BootB in search of project briefs. Like builders, creatives can be anyone - from New York advertising agencies to Bolivian high school students. They browse the projects, select the interesting ones, and submit their ideas.

The builder then reads through all the submissions and selects the best idea. The winning creative collects the fee.

It's a nice way to centralize creativity. One drawback, however, is that BootB relies on quantity of ideas, not quality. There's no feedback mechanism that would allow people to break out of their habitual thinking patterns into truly innovative solutions (the Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking techniques are, of course, examples of such a mechanism).

Nonetheless, we're glad to see BootB's efforts to encourage and reward innovative thinking. BootB is an innovative concept in its own right, and we wish them success.

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