An idea

When Bruce Mao spoke at Northwestern recently, he discussed his frustration quantum leap between hiring somebody and not hiring somebody to your firm.  This resonated with me for two reasons.  First, for a company to take somebody on, they must be reasonably confident that it is a good long-term investment.  Companies usually cannot hire somebody for one specific project without a plan for the future; investment in training and an ongoing commitment to salary and benefits prohibits this.  Consultants and freelancers are available for particular jobs, but they are expensive and the pool of available consultants is necessarily smaller than the pool of qualified people who would like to (and are able to) contribute to a particular endeavor.  Second, as an unemployed person, I am finding it difficult to connect with a company that both suits my needs and is willing to accept my limited proven experience in the workforce.  If I did find such a company, in this economic situation I cannot even be sure that such a situation would be lasting.

So what to do about this?  There are plenty of people out there with ideas, and there are plenty of people out there with the ability to execute those ideas.  What if there was a service which would match up people with complimentary interests and abilities in order to do certain things?  A guitarist and a singer, an entrepreneur and a programmer, an engineer and a machinist, a designer and a marketer--all could meet and collaborate in a mutually beneficial way, contributing their work to society without the burden of a long-term economic commitment.

The idea is for a service in which people could post their own listing of ideas and the ephemeral gigs that could contribute to the execution.  Listings would consist of a short description of the idea--with an arbitrarily high level of disclosure--and a brief listing of what work the poster is looking for help on.  Along with this, he or she might provide a starting point for negotiations on the ownership for the concept--likely as a portion of the project's equity.  Then, anybody with the talent and desire could get in touch with person and hopefully begin a collaboration.  

One problem that I foresee with this model is people stealing others' ideas.  There are two ways to prevent this: only disclose publicly as much as you feel comfortable with, and fully document and archive all correspondence.  If somebody were to steal and attempt to patent a concept from the program, it would be well documented (through the initial posting and ensuing correspondence) where the idea actually came from and who came up with it.  In essence, I envision the exchange of ideas provided by this system to work more like the science world than the business world--where progress and knowledge well documented and credit for innovation is systematically distributed according to prearranged metrics and relationships.

An existing example of this crowdsourcing business model is the site namethis, where everybody is encouraged to contribute ideas for the name of something and the winning entry (as decided by the poster) gets compensated.  Why couldn't this model work for more expansive projects?

In the spirit of the idea, I would like the development of this service to be a sort of proof of concept for the service itself.  If anybody believes they could contribute, I would love to hear from you.  I am in the greatest need of somebody with web programming abilities and somebody with marketing abilities, but I would love to hear from anybody with suggestions or opinions about any part of this.