One way to encourage collaboration on turning ideas into reality is to provide monetary incentive.

Bounty prizes aren’t new, but what would be interesting is if it were incorporated into an open innovation platform like vagueware. It would work something like this:

1. An idea is posted on the site, as per normal
2. A bounty pot is created with qualifying criteria: “Must be open source”, “Must work in Firefox”, etc.
3. There can be several bounty pots per idea, each with differing criteria
4. An individual pays money into the bounty pot they wish to support. A small (approximately 5%, say) charge is taken by the site in order to look after the administration of the bounty
5. As people contribute, the bounty gets larger and larger
6. The first person to release code that meets the qualifying criteria of the bounty pot receives whatever is in the bounty pot.

This would allow for many small contributors to the pot to make a much larger pot of money.