Business - Written Wednesday, October 28, 2009 by Denis Hancock - 0 Comments

Highlights from an interview with the co-founder of Motley Fool

I recently wrote up a detailed case study on the Motley Fool Caps community for clients our nGenera Insight research programs, using the lens of “prosumerism.” I’ve talked about prosumerism here many times before, but it basically centres on customer co-creation. I like to use a play on the famous JFK quote to describe what it’s all about – “ask not what you can do for your customers, but what your customers can do for each other!”

I continue to follow Motley Fool closely, and wanted to point readers towards a recent interview (on Forbes) with co-founder Tom Gardner. There are three particular elements I believe should be interesting to Wikinomics readers – their community approach to developing investment ideas (which started in 1994), the meritocratic approach to their Caps community (as opposed to a democracy or “pure” wisdom of crowds), and the importance of transparency.

The first comes in response to the third question, which was focused on what distinguishes them from their competitors. Key quote:

“…we brought that subject to the Internet in 1994 and we did so by basically saying, “We want to hear your ideas. We want to talk together. We want to learn together.” And we’ve ended up attracting a lot of very bright minds to The Motley Fool.”

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