Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Free Crowdsourcing Idea for Target, Inc.

Hey Target, how are you doing this afternoon? All is well in Northern California. It's warm, the coffee is fresh and digital music is coming through loud and clear.

My friends David Hegarty, Carolyn Starrett and I (Scott Orn) wanted to give you a free idea we came up for you while at Kellogg. You see, we're really into Crowdsourcing, which basically means aggregating and applying the tastes and opinions of the masses.

Some of our favorite sites are Threadless, Flickr and Hype Machine. We competed in the McKinsey Technology Challenge at Kellogg and our assignment was to build a proposal for a Fortune 100 company using 1 of 4 technologies. We went with Crowdsourcing and thought you would be the perfect company to apply it.

Here is the entire presentation, courtesy of our friends at Scribd.



Guess what? McKinsey thought it was a pretty good idea too. We placed in Honorable Mention (#3 or #4 out of 40+). Sadly, we didn't win the large cash prize but that's cool. It was actually fun to do, in a very dorky, b-school way. No need to thank us Target. No really, it's cool. No really, please don't send a check. Yes, I do live in Danville, CA, and David lives in Seattle and Carolyn lives in Santa Monica, but really, there is no way you are getting our mailing address so you can send us a check.

We're just happy to do our little part to grease the wheels of innovation. Best of luck!