A venture fund known as S.E.VEN (Social Equity Venture Fund) recently announced a novel competition for ideas to address an important issue in emerging economies: namely how to rate possible investment opportunities in potentially higher risk emerging economies. Their idea is to create an index to rate possible investments with the aim of increasing the flow of investment in these regions. While the aim of the competition is noble itself, what's most unique is HOW they will run the competition.

Here's a quote from their site:

"The VINE (Virtual Integrated Networking Experience) Project will award $50,000 in prizes to individuals or teams of contributors for developing investment indicators for emerging market SMEs (Small and Medium–sized Enterprises). We will do this through a five–month long online competition that invites anyone with ideas to submit, collaborate, and refine them. The end result will be an index of factors that the SEVEN Fund will release to the public to assist in broader analysis of investment opportunities for emerging market investment."

The Process of Open Innovation

In building our index, we could have taken several approaches. We could engage top academics – economists and business strategists – working in developing markets, or we could ask investment bankers and venture capitalists already investing in these markets; we could go straight to entrepreneurs themselves. We believe, however, that stimulating a dialogue among all these groups – and anyone else who is inspired to participate - will generate the most powerful insights. We especially welcome contributions from non-traditional participants in these discussions."

There's much more on their site describing the Open Innovation aspect, which I find it to be a very unique approach to running the competition. If they are successful, I would expect more and more organizations to adopt this approach to these types of competitions.