Innovation and entrepreneurial issues are some of my favorites  and House of Genius is a great volunteer organization that incorporates innovation, community and networking is a unique and powerful way.

Recently I attended the one-year anniversary of House of Genius. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t invited because I’m a genius, but to offer me an opportunity to help create genius with others.

House of Genius is an entrepreneurial community service that assembled 380 professionals from various fields to assist 57 entrepreneurs in 2011. The founders, Tim Williams, Toma Bedolla and Collin Adair, recognized an opportunity to create an ongoing community event where the contributors could share their expertise for a greater good. Beyond this, they are also more engaged with a small group and get value out of their time rather than a typical networking event where attendees can rarely engage and walk away with valuable or actionable new connections. If you attend House of Genius, you have to participate!

After attending three of these crowd sourcing sessions in 2011, my takeaway was that this unique structure is very special in how it benefits the volunteer participants as much as the presenting companies. They assemble smart, diverse groups of people to focus their collective creativity and experience to explore, discuss and solve important problems. Contributors gain value by applying the lessons of presenting entrepreneurs and other contributors to their own life or venture.

As Tim Williams describes it, “The genius really is in collaboration. We find the consensus of a diverse group of professionals is accurate almost 95% of the time, whereas insight gained from a one to one meeting shuts the door to innovation and other points of view — thus resulting in a higher rate of error.”

Read the full article on Huffington Post

The first group of iVolunteer (now SnapImpact) volunteers. Photo by Andrew Hyde

Community collaboration is the new black.  People everywhere are looking at more ways to serve their communities and help each other out.  Though it’s a tired phrase, we really do get more by giving.

My current volunteer projects are helping the Wild Animal Sanctuary with social media marketing and helping SnapImpact with marketing and connecting the volunteers to other resources.  SnapImpact has a great story showing how people are coming together to help others by volunteering their talents.

Snap Impact, a way to help make doing good easy, was born from an idea that Richard Grote and Dave Angulo had while attending a Startup Weekend conference where entrepreneurs meet to form teams, companies and projects. As they discussed how much they enjoyed past volunteer projects they searched their iPhones for an app to find local volunteer opportunities and realized that the app didn’t exist.

Startup Weekend where SnapImpact was born. Photo by Andrew Hyde.

Rich and Dave were in a great position to create the non-profit SnapImpact iPhone app because they saw the need for it and also knew that the Boulder community is full of talented developers and creative professionals that would enjoy helping to build it.

After a couple of months of meeting each morning for a few hours at local coffee shops to get the project off the ground, they shared what they were doing with the Boulder tech community, tweeted about it on Twitter and had 50 volunteers show up for the first meeting. Future presentations at the monthly Boulder Denver New Tech Meetups have also attracted more help with some of the attendees still continuing to spread the word to help out.

While the team was building the app, All For Good and the Hands On Network had agreed to share their data on nationwide volunteer opportunities. This was a crucial element to creating an iPhone app that can instantly share new local volunteer opportunities with the user based on their phone’s GPS location.

You can see the WordPress PlugIn version of the SnapImpact app at the bottom right corner of this blog.

Throughout the 10 months that have passed since the project originated many volunteers have come and gone and others have stayed. All of them have given some time, knowledge and work which has helped to build a volunteer based product that will be useful for people across the country.

So, what are your passions, talents and skills and what organizations could use what you have to offer?  Volunteer them, provide some positive influence and you’ll have a brighter today while building a better tomorrow for us all.