OpenIDEO: Now crowdsourcing your ideas for web start-ups

Source: N. (Neelie) Kroes i, published on Monday, April 16 2012.

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Across Europe, innovative Internet start-ups are making use of web possibilities to try out new ideas and bring them to market. I think that’s really important to our future economy : and I care a lot about supporting those entrepreneurs.

You may already have seen our Tech All Stars competition to find Europe’s hottest start-up talent.

And here’s one other thing we’re doing: the OpenIDEO crowdsourcing challenge. This is about identifying the issues and enablers for start-ups as they launch and grow: and finding the solutions to tackle the issues and support growth. If you haven’t yet checked it out, now is a great time.

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The question we’re asking has definitely hit a nerve with web entrepreneurs. Since the challenge launched a month ago, people from across the EU and across the world - 162 countries and territories in total, from the US to Kenya - have posted hundreds of inspirations, with over a thousand comments and tens of thousands of visitors .

And now we’re moving from people sharing their inspirations, to the concepting phase, where users try to address the challenges.

If you haven’t already, you still have time before April 26 to contribute your concepts on the site. And after that we’ll start refining and evaluating. There have already been dozens of great concepts posted, across a range of topics. Winning concepts will be considered for implementation by ourselves in the European Commission, and also of course open for development by private companies or individuals.

I’m personally very excited to see what kinds of ideas the community comes up with. And here’s one story that I heard recently that really reminded me how many barriers there can be.

It’s from one entrepreneur who found the costs of setting up a new company in one member state prohibitively high. For example, taxation comes into effect even before the company starts making a profit. And transferring intellectual proprerty to the new company also significantly increases its taxable value, and hence the liability, again even before the company’s got going in terms of “real” value.

Those costs get higher when the company wants to start recruiting - with hiring costs in some cases many times the annual salary.

And all this at the same time that governments are attempting to support or even subsidise innovation and growth.

The nature of the barriers - and in technical terms whose responsibility it would be to deal with them - are of course going to be varying and different. Sometimes it’s EU rules, sometimes national, and sometimes it’s just about (for example) getting entrepreneurs themselves to share experiences better. But whatever the barriers are, I want us to identify and be aware of them at the highest levels.

So help us out . Winning concepts will be announced on the 29th of May, and we’ll be taking the results to the Digital Agenda Assembly on the 21st and 22nd of June.

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