BigCarrot.com - Pooling the Resources of the Crowd

BigCarrot employs crowdsourcing to facilitate and encourage individuals to create and fund inducement prizes, which historically have been limited the very wealthy.

Those unfamiliar with what an inducement prize is might be familiar with an example of one: the Ansari X Prize that awarded $10 million to the builder of first commercial spaceship. More recently, Google has offered $10 million in prizes for the development of the best applications for their new gPhone platform, Android, that they're releasing next year. Google decided that instead of spending the money on hiring an internal team to come up with ideas for the software and then building them in-house, they'd let anyone around the world compete to see who could do the best job.

One can quickly see the wisdom of Google's approach. However, while Inducement prizes are great for the Googles of the world with $10 million to throw at a problem, what about those of us without eight-figure bank accounts? Well, if you and I and him and her are all advocates for similar causes, why don't we (and everyone else around the world) chip in and create an inducement prize that addresses our own interests?

BigCarrot is the place to do that. Anyone can come to the site and start an inducement prize on any topic using a patent-pending process that allows the community to collaboratively draft a prize’s rules. Anyone who agrees with its objective can contribute to the prize's endowment, and finally, anyone around the world who's able to provide a solution to the prize can submit a claim.

Whether it’s creating incentives for bio-diesel cars or the desire for a potato chip bag that will keep its contents fresh even after its been opened, BigCarrot provides the means for people to proactively advocate for their development. As the internet has demonstrated time and time again, when aggregated through the global population even the smallest niche has a sizable population.

Additionally, companies with limited R&D budgets can conveniently pool their resources to find a mutually beneficial solution to a problem. Or a company with a large research budget can set aside a relatively trivial amount of money to encourage the public to compete to find new and innovative solutions to their business problem. Both large and small companies benefit because if a solution in not found within the allotted time period, the entire value of the prize is returned to them, and if a solution is discovered, they’ve received the results at a substantial discount over what it would have cost to develop internally.