While Ideasicleˣ is new, the original Ideasicle has been around since 2010, and the concept behind it further back still. Here’s the story.

Appreciating the creative power of a collective.

The last agency I worked for before starting Ideasicle was Arnold Worldwide in Boston. I was the EVP Director of Business Development & Agency Innovation. Seven years of nothing but pitching. Pitch after pitch after pitch. I loved it.

But one thing you need more than ever in new business pitches is ideas. And you can’t wait for them. There’s a meeting on Tuesday and there’s no moving it. So one thing I started was an agency brainstorm where we’d take over a large room, post the brand idea/assignment on a wall, and then cover the rest of the walls with blank flip chart pages for the various kinds of ideas we needed—Outdoor, Social Media, PR, etc.

We would invite the entire agency between 1:00-4:00 to come down when they could and post some ideas. To insure attendance we’d order twenty pizzas and have a bucket of beer. By the end of these sessions we’d have hundreds of ideas. Not all were great, but a handful always were, which made the whole thing worthwhile.

Enter, The Innovation Station

Now, this was about the time that crowdsourcing was emerging—2006/2007 or so. Which got me to thinking, what if we could do this same agency wide brainstorm, but do it electronically? And, boom, “The Innovation Station” was born.

It was crude, but effective. The Innovation Station was an intranet site accessible only to Arnold employees, where the new biz team could post requests for ideas and then anyone in the company could post ideas. Seriously anyone, not just the creative department. While we couldn’t incentivize with beer and pizza, we did pay anyone who posted an idea that we used in our presentation $25 and an official Innovation Station Cup (I still have one). And we would get flooded with ideas.

Again, not all the ideas were great, but we always ended up with a handful we used. In fact, I remember pitching Carnival Cruise and we posted a request, “How can we better understand the concept of fun?” To which someone posted, “Interview clowns.” Genius! That inspired an entire film where we interviewed what we called “fun experts,” or people whose job it was to manufacture fun for people—roller coaster engineers, comedians, video game designers, etc. We didn’t interview clowns for some reason, but that one film was a big reason we won that business.

But then I got to thinking.

Ideasicle, expert sourcing was born.

Seeing the power of the Innovation Station, what if I were to point this kind of technology not to Arnold employees but to a hand-picked group of creative and strategic geniuses I had worked with at places like Wieden & Kennedy, Goodby, Mullen, and other agencies? And what if instead of crowdsourcing with the unvetted masses it was focused teams of four working together online from whatever city they lived in? After all, I figured, ideas don’t require bodies, they only require minds.

And Ideasicle was born. We called the model “expert sourcing” to push off from what we saw as the flawed model of “crowd sourcing.” Crowd sourcing pitted the participants against each other, they didn’t work as a team. Further, crowd sourcing meant sharing confidential briefs with the unvetted masses, a risk for any brand. With “expert sourcing,” Ideasicle’s experts worked in small teams of four and all were hand-picked. And our mantra was “Nothing is unthinkable.”

We started with one client and built out from there. It was a strange pitch because clients weren’t used to an agency who didn’t execute their ideas. It took courageous clients who really saw the value of the idea itself as separate and important.

Our sweet spot was in-house agencies because they could get outside perspective in the form of a flurry of ideas without the threat of a traditional agency taking over the business. But we worked with traditional agencies too, when they were in a pinch. One time we bailed out a creative director in Boston who forgot to tell his creative department about a meeting he had with a prospect with about ten ideas for his meeting the next day.

And we worked directly with clients, too. Like Warner Music Group, LinkedIn, Staples, CVS, Bose, AMD, and many others. For me it was heaven. I love to witness the birth of an idea, which is why I was in the ad biz anyway. But now it was all I did.

But why should I have all the fun?

Now all these years we’ve been reverse engineering an off-the-shelf platform for our idea projects. It was ok, but it was designed for project management, not collaboration around ideas. I’d always fantasized about building my own platform designed specifically and only for idea generation. Where all the right tools would be at the teams’ disposal, it would be user friendly, payments could be made on the platform, the whole thing.

And then it hit me. All this time I thought I was building a new kind of agency. But what I realized is I was just the first client. Meaning, if I build a SaaS platform designed only for idea-generation then why should I have all the fun? Why not open it up so that any customer can subscribe, recruit a team of four, have them come up with ideas, and then be able to pay them?

I just needed an investor to help me get it off the ground. In 2019 I found just such an investor who believed in me and believed in the concept of Ideasicleˣ. One year of software development later and we’re in beta!

So that’s our story. That’s how we got here. I have never been more excited about anything in my life. In our first beta with an ad agency on the very first day of their idea-generation on a project, the agency contact sent me a text, “TEAM 1 is ON FIRE with 20 ideas!”

That, my friends, is what this is all about.

Will Burns is the founder and CEO of Ideasicleˣ.

Follow him on Twitter @willoburns.