Sounds like a very nice idea to me.

I would not bother looking for "open problems" stated in patents --for instance, some open problems in my own patent 9 years ago are no longer relevant!

I'd go after the crowds for this...

Focusing on problems, rather than stating them and solving them at the same time has many advantages. In CH, the “elevator pitch” is brilliant, but I still feel that ideas could be front-ended with well defined, categorized, and *unsolved* problem statements, and ideas should revolve around solving those.

There are many advantages to this:

- Wider audience. Some people are better at stating problems than at solving them.

- Better focus. I think that part of the reason some ideas in CH fall through is because the creator is expected to also provide a solution. Not everyone is willing or capable of doing both.

- Less redundancy. People can vote on whether a problem has been solved. Your idea can solve a whole suite of these too.

- Classification. Problems can be classified and hence evaluated on their nature.

- Decomposition. Problems can be further broken down into sub-problems, which greatly lend themselves into better collaboration. For instance, solutions can be approached from different perspectives, such as business and technical feasibility, which are roles that should be mutually exclusive.

- Better work flow. The ranking system above will produce a cleaner, more robust outflow of products. You haven’t defined your biz model, but CH (and mine) revolves around software products.

- Re-usability of resources. Some problems overlap and their scope can be widened, which means that solutions can be reused.

So much more to say…

These sites exist already, both for scientific problems as for marketing. Don't recall the names right know.
Tommy

vanhees:
The closest coming sites that I have found are:
1)"Open problem garden", http://garden.irmacs.sfu.ca/, a site which contains about 150 unsolved problems in mathematics and a possibility to post them
2)http://www.innocentive.com, a site where companies publish open problems, "challenges", to solver community with money rewards for the one who solves the problem.
Do you have any clues about where to find those sites you mentioned?

ooper:
Interesting point that you should rather "go for the crowds" than go through the patent databases and collect information about open problems in patent publications. You could give the crodws the opportunity to publish interesting, original, relevant and unsolved problems.

Business model could be advertising or charging a fee for using the more advanced features of the service, that's all I've been able to think of.

Since half of innovation is seeing an unsolved problem or gap in the market, what happens when people start making money by solving the problems you list? Will it be a truly open database, in that once posted a problem is in the public domain and freely available to anyone? Will you impose any limitations on the openness of any solution? (And how will you enforce it?)

I agree that stating a need in the market or an unsolved problem can be half fulfilling or solving it. If you see such a gap somewhere but you are unable to fill it by yourself, you should post it to this database for anybody to use. In other words, I think that this database should be truly open, in the sense that anyboy could browse it for free for his own purposes - for example for trying to find a solution to some open problem in the database or to use it as a help in some kind of development work, to help in giving an idea about what hasn't been done yet.

Innocentive makes money by charging a fee from the companies that use their service. The service is that the companies get to publish open problems for the solver community. If a solution is found, the company pays (besides the fee for using the service) a prize for the solver and the company gets the IP. So what would happen with this database if someone would solve a problem by using it? He would own the IP and have the rights to do anything with it - patent it, make money with it etc. It sounds like it would be fair to reward the publishers of the problems - if they are good - somehow.

Limitations on the openness of any solution? I don't understand this question; it should be a database of problems, not solutions. If you mean problems, I would suggest that to find out if the posted problem is open, it should left for open discussion and critique.

Very interesting idea, perhaps this could be something along the lines of a Ask Yahoo type thing? Meaning you post your problem... I need a ladder that can stand on steps, and which is extremely stable. Then the community could review the problem to first see if their is a solution then if there is no product out there the problem is added to a database.

The only problem from my point of view is that inspiration comes from your own experiences. Meaning I would be able to come up with a idea to sold a problem a lot better if I was the one that saw the problem in the first place vs reading someone else's problem.

Just something to keep in mind.

Sorry one last thing, were dose revenue come in? do you have to pay a membership or is it an ad based system?

I'm very happy with Innocentive.

Brenden: The business model could be advertising or some kind of paid membership.

A way to add the interestingness of the site from point of view of the crowds whose task is to fill the database with problems, could be to give the crowds an opportunity to earn some money by submitting problems. If someone finds a solution to some problem in the bank, he would pay a small amount of money to the one who has submitted the problem. I don't know how to implement this so that the solver would be forced to pay. Perhaps it could happen on a voluntary basis? At least it would be fair to reward the publishers of original problems that can lead to solutions that have value in terms of money.

There's a lot of activity going on in the field of open innovation, check http://www.openinnov...wdsourcing-examples/ .

I like this idea. The people on the site would be more motivated than some crowd-sourcing sites.
You could describe the problem you need resolved or designed then hold a competition for the best idea put forward, with either cash or shares in the solution

"limitations on the openness" - sorry, I didn't explain that very well!

If the problems are identified, discussed and solved by a community, it might seem appropriate that any (eg software or hardware) solution be made open-source so that a community can continue to develop it. This doesn't prevent anyone from making money from it of course, but it does mean that the opportunity is still available to everyone else.

Of course the latter could also be achieved by leaving 'solved' problems on the site (but with details of any previous solutions and their IP protection?) so that anyone else can attempt to compete if they wish.

Does open source fit into developing solutions for technical problems? Who gets it the IP if somebody comes up with a patentable solution?

I think this service should be for individual people capable of posing relevant problems and individual people capable of providing solutions. But I'm not sure, perhaps this might offer a way for collaborative problem solving?

I do like the idea. But I think it might work a little better if it was broader. Not just a tech problem database, but a, like you say in your pitch, "Open Problem Database". People could see and reply and post problems and fixes to anything from tech problems, to marketing problems, to kid problems. I think this would bring you a much bigger user base. Just an idea. I do like were your going with it though.

I do like the idea. But I think it might work a little better if it was broader. Not just a tech problem database, but a, like you say in your pitch, "Open Problem Database". People could see and reply and post problems and fixes to anything from tech problems, to marketing problems, to kid problems. I think this would bring you a much bigger user base. Just an idea. I do like were your going with it though.

Yes why not extend the idea to be broader than just for technical problems? There are so many classes of problems.. For example social problems, check http://www.changemakers.net/ and http://www.globalide...bank.org/site/home/, sites which focus on posting and collaborative solving of social problems. What do you mean with kid problems?

The idea of a structured problem database seems to be new. I have found sites focusing on problem solving where you can post problems but you could do it better - so that some meta information would be collected at the time when the problem is posted for the purposes of searching. What I don't know yet, is how would you make the site such that the one who posts a problem could earn money with it.

"Some people are better at stating problems than at solving them", ooper commented. That's what the whole idea relies on.

Brenden commented that it's easier to come up with a solution if you've spotted the problem yourself. That may be true - you're already involved in solving it if you've found the problem. But who knows what the crowds could do if there were such a database.

I don't know about extending beyond technical problems. I like the idea in principle but I think you'll have to think carefully to make it work. The way I see this idea is focused on the solutions - generating novel solutions and hopefully going on to develop these into products - as opposed to FOCUSING on getting the problems themselves solved. Of course the solution of the problems is part of that, if only because for a product of this type to be successful it has to be useful enough that people buy it, but it's not an mTurk-style 'solve my problems for me' site.

For problems to fit into the database then they need to be repeatable (and hopefully common) so that the solutions are useful to others and they must yield the potential of realisable (and hopefully 'productable', if I may coin a new term) solutions. Thus, "fix my relationship with my girlfriend" and "design an extractor system to filter the air in my workshop, dimensions l x w x h, with machines A and B in use" both fall foul of the first criterion while "design a new economic system for my country that supports sustainable developments while still giving a fair chance to local producers" obviously doesn't meet the second.

Well-designed technical problems are by their nature ideal for this, but that's not to say there isn't ANYTHING non-technical that'll work.

This is turning out to be an interesting idea... good luck with it!

Thanks! Thanks to all the other commentators as well.

Congratulations on winning this week's Ideawarz... Good Luck with moving it forward!!

Thanks!

"End-user innovation is by far the most important source of innovation", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation .

I've been thinking about a mechanism to reward the publishers of problems. Here it is:

The service promotes voluntarily payment of money for the publisher of the problem in the case that somebody happens to solve it. The one who pays is the one who solves the problem and gets to use the solution for his own purposes. The amount paid could be the amount that the solver considers to be fair with respect to the utility he has gotten from reading the description of the problem.

This is a way to promote the service: You have the chance to earn money by submitting problems. The system is fair: the one who deserves a reward is the one who has submitted the valuable piece of information, a genuine need or gap in the market. The one who manages to solve it is free to do whatever he wants with it, including turning the solution into money.

This system is a compact way to express what kind of material would be wanted in the database:submit problems that a so unique that the solver is ready admit that and reward it by paying and submit problems that are solvable. All the contributors benefit: The service can promote itsef as a wiki whose contributors can earn money, this attracts hot problems and solvers benefit from getting the rights to their solutions. But it only works if the solvers are ready to pay voluntarily.

What do you think?