The Silent Penguin

This is definitely an interesting idea Matt.

Critical, of course, is that you attract folks who are interested in the
company surviving and thriving.

Then, my critical side tells me that even most people who consider themselves business people don't know who to make a successful company and that the only way to be successful is to get a company idea up & running fast then see what happens before sinking everything. The "beta company"[TM] if you will.

I'd like to be proven wrong though!

This is a great idea. I've been working on an admittedly low-interest project for a few years, but I've only recently setup a wiki and blog for it. I haven't had all that much time to work on it, but I'd imagine that if I kept it up, it could turn viable.

Ultimately, the project could spawn a company, but that's probably highly unlikely. Being open would definitely be interesting from the start though.

Not quite the same thing, since it's really for my use only, but I have actually been writing my business plan on a wiki :-)

However, I can see the idea that a service type business could benefit from this. The problem might be in convincing and persuading potential partners and customers that this is a Good Thing and then of course teaching them how to use a wiki or blog (even in the tech industry I suspect that you would still need to do that).

Some years ago I worked on a business plan with people here in the UK that was kind of a "Sourceforge" to open businesses like this. It never happened, the partenrs simply couldn't understand the profit model. However, now that Open Source is more recognisable in the real world now might be the time.

The idea was that we recognised that good business ideas are reasonably easy to come by, but developing those ideas into real plans with the necessary skills to make it work was extremely difficult. Our plan was to build a site that would allow people to meet and develop their individual business plans in an open fashion. The business would donate a portion of their stockholding to the "exchange" and all active members of the "exchange" would own a share of the "exchange" itself. In this way a succesful business would bring money in, whilst an unsuccesfull one would simply die away. Profits would be divided amongst active members on a periodic basis.

We had a reward system worked out that meant the more peer recognition one recieved for their contirubtions to members ventures the more reward they got from the profits of the exchange. It was pretty solid, although needed some work.

Unfortunately, as I said, my prospective partners never quite "got it" and it ended up becoming a standard business networking site (see http://www.fortunexchange.co.uk - I am *not* a part of this business I pulled out before they launched as it wasn;t doing what I wanted to do).

When I pulled out I went to live in a developing country for a while, I believe this business model would be great to help out developing countries and wanted to see for myself whilst I waited for the world to catch up with the original idea. The good news is that it *would* be a great way of using the talent that exists in the developing world.

I launch my new company in two weeks. It is not a company doing this work, but there are some parallels. I would be *very* interested in exploring this original idea again, and this post is amazingly close to it.

Do not forget that you open yourself to the competitors as well. Business world is a tough one :)

With respect to Pinocio's comment:

Many businesses have a market that is so large that it is a good thing to collaborate with "competitors" rather than to compete with them. It is a tried and tested business practice for larger companies to "divide and conquer". The only defence is for smaller companies to group together. In the past this was almost impossible due to communications and coordination problems, however, the Internet has the potential to change all that.

At least that was our belief when working on the business plan I mention above.

In addition, it is possible to keep some of the work in a "walled garden", so that key strategic details remain known only to those actively involved with the business. This is *exactly* how it works in a traditional business where there is publically available info to customers and stockholders and then there is the smokey boardroom stuff.

Needless to say, we believe we had this part covered in our business plan too ;-)