Weekly task 5 Ideagoras - Saimi Jukkara

Ideagoras sites are places where both representants of different companies and organisations and individuals can gather together in order to exchange ideas and solutions to different kinds of problems. These places are open and basically anyone can join to them.

The biggest advantage for individual users is that they are able to share their knowledge and usually also gain some profit from it. For example, Amazon Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com) advertises itself as a way to work from home and gain money by doing HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks). These HITs are at many times quite easy in a way that it does nor require that much effort but the paycheck is also quite small - beginning from 0.01$.

I think that this kind of thing could actually be a good hobby for people. Many of the HITs are basic things that do not require much special knowledge. For example, people are asked to rewrite some sentences or tell what they thing about some particular sentence (is it positive or negative and so on). There are also some sort of education for people. For example the Mechanical Turk requires people to do "WebReviews Qualification Master Test" in order to do that kind of HITs.

Of course there are also more difficult tasks. In these cases the disadvantage for individuals is that the requester who has made the HIT becomes the owner of the piece of work. For example in Amazon Mechanical Turk the people who answer tho HITs has to accept a Participation Agreement. In this agreement it is said that "As a Provider, the Requester for whom you provide Services is your client, and as such, you agree that the work product of any Services you perform is deemed a "work made for hire" for the benefit of the Requester, and all ownership rights, including worldwide intellectual property rights, will vest with the Requester immediately upon your performance of the Service.". (https://www.mturk.com:443/mturk/conditionsofuse)

So basically this means that if someone really comes up with a superb idea the payment of that can be just a dollar or so and the profit for the company can be counted in millions.

From companies these kind of webpages can be a really good source of information. This does not mean only new innovations and such but also smaller issues. For example, a company could do a user survey of their webpages through this kind of service and ask people to give ideas to improve their webpages, find broken links and so on. Furthermore there are HITs for translations to different languages and so on. Naturally this is an easy and also quite cheap way of gaining this kind of information for the company. I do not think that many companies for example in Finland are using these kind of services so for example a small or medium sized company could really profit from them. It can be really a lot cheaper to pay 0.01$ for "normal people" to do surveys than hire a professional to gather the information.

Personally I am a little bit sceptic for these kind of portals to really share a high-value ideas and innovations but for different kinds of smaller tasks they are a good tool.

Weekly task 5: Ideagoras:There is always more knowledge outside the company (Jonna Ylikauppila)

In this weekly task I should deeper analyze the pros and cons of the virtual places that offer a gathering place for people,their knowledge& abilities and furthermore a place for companies to search new ideas and solutions.I should likewise give examples and describe how our University could use ideagoras.

Pros and cons for individuals
There will be more and more work available for talented individuals who have come out with their new ideas.
These new ideas can create more jobs when further R&D,marketing,manufacturing etc needs to be done.Of coure it can likewise work other way around and diminish the manpower needed.
You can post your ideas to ideagoras and if somebody gets interested get money out of it,but in that case you likewise have to meet best the challenge criterias
Your innovative idea can open you a career on that specific area you are good at,even international career is possible
You have to compete against other talents
In innocentive database your property rights are protected if the company to whom your idea has been revealed doesn’t want to use it after all.In that case the intellectual property rights will protect you from abuse,the company cannot use that idea if you are not paid for it.


Pros and cons for company
When you have managed to gain the rights to a noble and good idea it may occur that your company is the first company providing that kind of product and you will get a market advantage/competitive advantage out of that.When you are the first one it likewise takes some time from your competitors to develop similar products/substitutes which will give you more time to further develop your product/service.
There is always more intelligent and talented people outside your company and it is possible to find some of them when using Ideagoras type of services.
You can get ideas and opportunities from Ideagoras without need to hire people,even though that is likewise possible to do.
You can get new ideas cheap and you don’t have to spend your time and money to develop that one
You can focus more on answering customers needs with those new innovations
Innocentive helps all sized companies and even non-profit organizations
The new ideas can come all around the world and you are not limited to a certain area or country,thanks to internet
You can more rapidly answer to changing customer needs


How our university could use this?

Our University could use Ideagoras to measure and ensure the satisfaction of the staff and students as well as a tool for further development. This could help our University to create better communication and marketing methods between different partner schools in Finland and worldwide.

By this means the level of the education, cooperation and studying services could be evaluated more efficiently and developed in cooperation with the other schools. Worldwide study using Ideagoras could point out some good and bad ways on carrying out things in our school and we could learn some better or new ways from other schools.

This kind of study could likewise be used to monitor the amount of drop out students in different study areas and be used to detect the reasons for those drop outs.