ThinkOOB

ThinkOOB is America’s Marketplace of Ideas™, the eBay of Creative Problem-Solving.

It is a community blog that rewards lay people for coming up with solutions to society’s problems. It is specifically for smart, creative people who have ideas that can maybe change the world but have no place to test them out. The figurative “marketplace of ideas” (lower case) is usually too crowded with experts’ ideas for lay people to get theirs noticed. That is why ThinkOOB is America’s literal Marketplace of Ideas (Upper Case). It makes the marketplace for new ideas efficient, by bringing them all together in one place and inviting comments on the basis of merit, not pre-existing expertise.

Unlike lay people, “experts” already have plenty of places they can post solutions becasue they have become well-known in their fields. How did they become well-known? By developing something in the past, which naturally they want to advocate for in the future. Past solutions might occasonally work in the future, but ThinkOOB is looking for new blood — people whose lack of emotional attachment to old ideas frees their minds to develop new ones. For instance, the most successul computer company of the 1970s was Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), rising from its roots as the first venture capital-backed company in history in 1959 to become the preeminent producer of minicomputers. One could argue that its founder and CEO, Ken Olsen, was the leading expert on small computers of the era. Once he asked rhetorically, “Why would anybody want a computer in their home?” And ten years later DEC was gone.

The OOB in “ThinkOOB” stands for “out of the box.” We want contributors to post their own ideas in the form of essays. Then, ThinkOOB users post feedback and comments to improve these ideas. We don’t want essays advocating proposals already in the public domain on this site. We want new ideas, out-of-the-box ideas, ideas that align political and economic feasibility, societal and individual interests.

We do not police the political leanings of the ideas except in the extreme situations where the site owner sees an obvious political agenda and feels that the ThinkOOB culture of openness is being subverted. The point of out-of-the-box thinking is that any political agenda should be incidental to solving the problem.

While working to solve society’s problems is a reward in and of itself, a little extra incentive never hurts. The first idea originated on ThinkOOB which becomes policy at the national level, whether legislative or administrative, wins a prize of $1-million. See prize rules for details.