Free idea....to a good home

They say that "an idea not acted upon is worthless." Well, what if someone else acts on it?

Ever had a great idea but lacked the resources...or motivation to act upon it? Well don't throw that great idea away...donate it! Authors Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff have written a book called "Why Not?" which among other things discusses "open source" ideas. They've put together a companion website which acts as marketplace for free ideas. As of today the catalog of donated ideas contains 249 categories and 2,089 ideas.

My own humble submission to the catalog can be found here, but I like the idea so much I've included the text here as well (it IS my blog :-) :

This is something 3M should team up with Dell or HP to produce (IMHO). An office computer printer that uses a "yellow sticky" notes as the page separator. The networked printers in most offices are usually set up to have a cover sheet that separates different user's print outs. The problem is that if there are several printed documents or a large document, you spend several minutes sifting through a pile looking for the separator. With this idea you could have a sticky note that separates different print outs off to the side. To get fancy, the printer could print "John Doe's print out" on the sticky note before placing it as a separator. It could go on to place the notes so that they were staggered between print outs, to let you read all the notes in a large pile at once. This would save people time, and a nice added bonus would be all the paper that is saved from all those full size cover sheets.
-mditson, Aug 23 2005

And to the person who left the comment asking "don't all good printers collate?" the answer is no, absolutely not-- you're just lucky in your office I'm afraid.

This brings up another point about good ideas and getting them into the hands of people who can use them. Why is it so hard to contact the right people at a company? Why doesn't 3M, Dell, or HP have a big old "suggestion box" button on their web sites? Too busy to listen? It's too bad. As a product marketer myself I would love direct, unprompted access to ideas from prospects in my target segment.