Ideas bank

An ideas bank is a widely available shared resource, usually a website, where people post, exchange, discuss, and polish new ideas. Some ideas banks are used to develop new inventions or technologies. Many corporations have installed internal ideas banks to gather the input from their employees and improve their ideation process. Some ideas banks employ a voting system to estimate an idea's value. In some cases, ideas banks can be more humor-oriented than their serious counterparts. The underlying theory of an ideas bank is that if a large group of people collaborate on a project or the development of an idea that eventually said project or idea will reach perfection in the eyes of those who worked on it.[citation needed][1]

Many ideas banks are provided as free of charge, or set around certain companies in general to work out new inventions.[2] Although ideas are provided by a community of people, problems can arise when people take the ideas from the site and begin developing them.[3] There is no possible way to prove that the idea on the ideas bank was original and not taken from something else.

  1. ^ Sandstrom, C., & Bjork, J. (2010). Idea management systems for a changing innovation landscape. International Journal of Product Development, 11(3-4), 310-324.
  2. ^ See the definition for Open Source Hardware from the Open Source Hardware Association, http://www.oshwa.org/definition/
  3. ^ Dorta, T., Perez, E., & Lesage, A. (2008). The ideation gap:: hybrid tools, design flow and practice. Design studies, 29(2), 121-141.