T-Shirt Maker's Style, Drawn From Web Users

DeHart and Nickell both grew up with an artistic bent. DeHart, now 25, drew and painted. Nickell, 26, did graffiti. They met through an Internet discussion group about design, according to Jeffrey Kalmikoff, who later joined the company as chief creative officer. They stumbled across the idea for Threadless after entering an online competition to design a shirt for a conference in London. Nickell won.

"They said, 'Isn't this really fun and really cool? Let's do it again,' " Kalmikoff said. "It was never like, 'When we grow up, we want to own a T-shirt company.' "

So they held an online T-shirt competition of their own and produced the winning design. The contest was so popular they decided to convert it into a business .

The company, which now employs 30 people, receives about 150 design submissions a day. Each one remains posted on the Web site for a week and those winning the most votes from more than a half-million registered users are chosen. Winning designers get $1,500 in cash and $500 worth of merchandise.

By turning to the Web, the company has been able to market designs far better than what Kalmikoff says he and his two colleagues could have created. Over the company's life, he said, the competition has grown so fierce that Threadless has received 150,000 submissions, only 1 percent of which are chosen for production. Even famous designers who have entered the contest have failed to win.

In contrast with the accidental genesis of Threadless, InnoCentive was the creation of a carefully considered strategy by Eli Lilly, the 131-year-old pharmaceutical giant.

"There was a recognition that there's a richness and diversity out there that's difficult to capture in full-time head count," said Dwayne Spradlin, InnoCentive's chief executive.

InnoCentive soon opened the site to other companies, which can pay more than $100,000 to join. About 10 percent of Fortune 500 corporations have posted challenges, especially in chemistry and life science, Spradlin said. Crowdsourcing research has proven cost-effective because companies pay only for problems solved rather than their own hit-and-miss R&D efforts, he said.

More than 500 challenges have been posted to InnoCentive in the past six years and about a third successfully answered, he said. The solvers include more than 120,000 scientists, with about half from China, Russia and India.

In one instance, Colgate Palmolive asked for a more efficient way to put toothpaste into a tube. The creator of the solution, which involved using an electrical charge on the paste powder, was rewarded with $25,000.

Another query posted by an anonymous company asked for a method to prevent one of its food preservatives from deteriorating and discoloring. Michael S. Leonard, a chemistry professor at Washington & Jefferson College near Pittsburgh, took two days to develop a way to tweak the molecules to prevent the preservative from breaking down. His solution won him $10,000.

Leonard acknowledged that some colleagues frown on InnoCentive.

"Some people think I'm selling myself short, giving up my expertise for relatively little," Leonard said. But, he added, "I enjoy the intellectual challenge, and any compensation I get is compensation I wouldn't have gotten otherwise."