I'm a fan of Mark Cuban's Blogmaverick. In a recent post he issued the The Movie Business Challenge whereby he offered a job to someone who could solve the following problem:
"How do you get people out of the house to see your movie without spending a fortune. How can you convince 5 million
people to give up their weekend and go to a theater to see a specific movie without spending 60mm dollars. For those of you doing the math. You are right. Its not unusual to spend 8, 10 , 12 dollars PER PERSON that goes to
a movie in the opening weekend. Shoot, its not unusual for studios to spend that much per person to get people to go to
the theater through a movies entire run !"
The amazing thing about this post was that the last time I looked there were 827 comments that provided suggestions as to how to solve the problem. I didn't read all of them but many of these, I thought, we actually creative, effective ideas. (One thirteen year old girl posted 2 comments, numbers 820 and 823, both interesting ideas. My comment is number 781.) There were another 40 or so comments at GigaOM where Robert Young has a lengthy post. When solving a business problem there's typically no shortage of ideas, it's the execution that's the toughest thing. But if you have 800+ ideas, most of which coming from customers, the odds on finding a few that can be well-executed have to increase noticeably.

















