In an impressively short time, Kickstarter has quickly become the go-to high-impact mashup of crowdsourcing sensibility and entrepreneurial endeavor. If you've got a genuinely creative idea — or even a "me, too with a twist" — Kickstarter's "crowd funding" platform offers a genuinely innovative way to finance creativity and innovation. Since its 2009 launch, Kickstarter claims that more than 4.1 million people have pledged over $619 million to fund over 41,000 projects. It's exciting.
But Kickstarter's inspiration and effectiveness at facilitating "just-in-time creative communities" — or what has also been described as "impulse patronage" — poses a provocative challenge to the C-suites of global organizations worldwide: Where are their Kickstarters? Why aren't leaders tapping the crowdfunding capabilities of their own innovation ecosystems to stimulate their people and ideas?
