Ideagoras as an Integral Part of Business - Essay Example

Ideagoras In the contemporary modern world, the globe has rapidly transformed by technology driven by intellect. The era of using conquest and military might to create markets like was done during the scramble and partition of Africa is long gone. Long distance trading of caravans and the numerous voyages around the world are no more. The internet especially the World Wide Web application has been the major platform that necessitate the change in business polices by nations, multinational companies, small companies and various other organizations. However, history is indispensable to people and major innovation and inventions take a gradual systemic path; it is only that people do not realize. Even revolutions have a certain degree of gradualness. Agora, which in the ancient Greece was the main place of gathering with the aim of conducting trade and crucial information sharing, has been used by modern innovators to come up with a modern common market. The common modern market has however mainly relied on the computer for ideas rather than eye-to-eye contact like in the ancient Greece. Using this idea of the Greece market, innovators have created Web sites on the internet for large number of people and businesses to converge with the common goal of sharing ideas and solutions for various problems. This is a shift from the ancient market setting where goods were the main items of trade while in the modern times it is ideas. This borrowing from the ancient Agora market to develop a market driven by ideas is termed as Ideagoras (Idea + Agoras). Ideagoras has influenced heavily on the management of many companies and has been in use in modifying the various production processes by different diverse companies. The venue of converging is the internet. The meetings in the internet have broken the various geographical and cultural barriers. Companies no matter their location in the world are able to interact freely, online. One such market is InnoCentive. InnoCentive is a company that helps other companies to precisely define, appropriately integrate and effectively execute the various innovative strategies that they may be having. InnoCentive emphasizes on extensive and intensive conclusive research and radicalized development on various diverse disciplines like engineering and business. After gathering the various proposals and areas of research from various managers or companies, the InnoCentive then posts them on the net as problems. This ideagoras company then calls on scientists to try to come up with the most appropriate solution, of which these scientists are solvers. The companies that have followed the problems are seekers. The solver who comes with the needed answers based on the provided guidelines is given cash rewards. InnoCentives has had more than seventy registered seekers and thousands of solvers, over four hundred solutions obtained with millions being collected as cash rewards to the solvers (Bishop, 2010). Syngenta, a large multinational agricultural company, employed the services of InnoCentive and consequently had greater impacts on its production and finances. Syngenta mainly deals with crop protection, provides lawn and home-care products in addition to seed business. Contacting Syngenta on a survey aiming at finding the effectiveness of idearagos, it came to the realization that; the company-realized cost saving from the challenge solutions, transfer time emanating from intellectual property got drastic reduction. Syngenta’s organizational researchers were able to realize massive productivity savings, and the innovation capability of the company was radically improved; by providing alternative methods and hence the transformation of the various projects from high-risk projects to low-risk and low-cost challenges (Bishop, 2010). Syngenta also realized much improved internal collaboration and was able to utilize external talents that were otherwise outside the agribusiness field, the company’s research processes were also greatly improved and made efficient. The agribusiness company utilized one of the program presented to by InnoCentive as a major innovation initiative for exploring ways to radically outmaneuver and outdo its main competitors. The use of ideagoras helped the company to conduct the most conclusive research at a low cost, with low risk involvement and essentially the company was able to produce a modified pesticide that was also environment friendly. This was very important, as the management was able to attain the targeted goal employing new tactics to compete with the chief competitors. The company also expanded rapidly with production firms for the pesticides being set in several parts. Since ideagoras had enabled the company to cut costs in research and in production, the price of the new product was farmer friendly, which has made the pesticide remain very popular with farmers for its low price, yet very effective and environmental friendly Ideagoras have become very useful to managers especially on the production processes. Global warming and other industrial initiated environmental degradations have made managers to look for other modes of production. Turning to the wide internet market for solutions has proved to be very useful with solar and wind mode of production and development being well developed by the various experts on the ideagoras markets. Solar gadgets (like watches, calculator, and even mobile phones) have been produced by various companies after their management had sought the help of scientists in these markets. The presence of a wide pool of knowledge to draw from, in the internet has made managers to become more daring as they have a reliable source to rely on whenever they faced by various challenges, they do not have to jeopardize the respective companies for lack of ideas, as they have internet sources. Ideagoras have continued to be an integral part of business because of the resourceful information sourced. Data mining has enabled corporation to have facts they did not have before, thus keeping in touch with the market place proceedings, the use of the wide markets have become very cost cutting as companies do not have to move around hiring researcher to determine for them the best ways of improving their productions. The researchers are already available in the internet. Reliance on these wide internet markets, whose core agenda is sharing ideas and solving problems, has in turn created large internet following. Social networks like twitter and face book have become very useful medium of advertising. Managers in various corporations make sure their products are universal rather than regional, producing products for consumption in many parts of the world. Consumers are also not lagging behind; many purchases nowadays occur online. This means an individual is able to acquire what his area or nation does not produce. The internet has indeed turned into a big market that has no specific day for the process of selling rather products can be available at all times. Companies and management has turned to producing goods or providing services that ca be accessed at any time of the day. The ideagoras have also led to the creation of blogs and cloud computing, which in turn has led to more communication and collaborations across board. Cloud computing has revolutionized business ventures giving the users the freedom to control what they use while at the same time the company provider retaining full maintenance rights. Users take only what they can consume and there is room for expansion if more room. Ideagoras has been very important in production with peer production and innovations taking center stage. Those companies that cannot exhaustively market all their good ideas can license them while the company that has low capacity for innovation gets the chance to access technologies that could have been very expensive to avail internally. Technological innovations in one organization may create efficiencies in another company due to the cross-fertilization. Production processes these days are chiefly, in some companies, driven by the knowledge gotten from the internet markets of ideas. Ideagoras have become very essential for solving, recurrent, perennial or very complex problems and that is why it gets comparison to the crossword puzzle. This has seen new knowledge acquisition by sharing ideas especially when the source of the knowledge is a credible source in a certain profession. Sharing of ideas on the internet has replaced the traditional forms of sourcing for information. Reference List Barkley, B. (2008). Project Management in New Product Development. New York: McGraw-Hill Companies Bishop Michelle (2010). The Total Economic Impact™ OfInnoCentive’s Enterprise Solution: Challenges, InnoCentive@Work,And ONRAMP Single-Company Case Study. Cambridge: Forrester Consulting. Read More