Brainnovate

I was reading the “Public Timeline” at Twitter yesterday and found a rather interesting web application. Many of you may be wondering how I have the time to read the public timeline… and well, I don’t. It was a moment of shameless self indulgence and Twitter exploration. I find it interesting to click people links to try and gain an understanding of who is actually using Twitter beyond my own network. As I have mentioned in my past posts, Twitter is currently made up of 1 million of the earliest adopters, so you are bound to find something interesting. Does TwitterStumble exist yet?

What I found is IdeaCV- sort of a social brainstorming and innovation tool. This is almost identical to my original vision for Brainnovate, before I decided to just build a blog with it. In fact it was the reason I registered this domain name in the first place.  Ultimately I identified a number of reasons why I didn’t want to invest the resources to do this, so it became a great name for a blog about innovation and brainstorming instead.

Here is how it works and why its an interesting idea: Brainstorming and coming up with great ideas is tough, and its seldom a solo endeavor. With IdeaCV, you post your idea to the site and get immediate feedback from other users, hopefully helping to refine the concept. Other users post their ideas, and you can help them by offering suggestions, criticisms, etc.

The site is well executed and appears to be built using one of my favorite innovation tools- Ruby on Rails.

The company behind this site, Increo Solutions claims on their site they are just getting started and expect to have more on the way, but their site just says that the software is in alpha. We’re looking forward to seeing what they come up with. I am guessing some kind of enterprise version where you can lock down outside access to the system.

Personally my biggest complaint about sites like this revolves around intellectual property, and that people are generally unwilling to share their ideas publicly. If I have a great idea, the last thing I am going to do is go and post it in a public forum for other entreprenuers to “cherry pick” and then become my competition.

Then there is the whole concept of who owns what. If you post the next Facebook, and the core concepts are developed collaboratively, isn’t that like wearing a target on your back that says “Sue me?”

The best part for me anyhow, is that I no longer feel compelled to build something like this.