The Hidden Cost of Missed Ideas
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Every year, thousands of healthy, adoptable dogs and cats are euthanized in shelters across the United States—not because people don’t want pets, but often due to the challenging logistics of connecting the right adopter with the right pet in real time. The heartbreaking reality is that if just 6% more people who said they wanted to get a pet adopted one instead of using a breeder, then needless shelter killings could be eliminated.
There are a lot of obstacles facing pet adoption. Some people think shelter pets are “broken”, while others want specific traits of particular breeds. However, even for those who want to rescue an animal, market inefficiency is a major challenge. Shelters usually don’t have the budget to update or digitize information about the pets available for adoption. Physical distance and disconnected management systems create barriers to uniting rescue parents with potential pets that are not in their immediate community.
Amy Starnes, a senior leader at Best Friends Animal Society, shared with me how she’s tackling this problem head-on—and what she has learned has applications to any area where we are looking to create change. Best Friends Animal Society is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to ending the killing of dogs and cats in shelters across the United States. With a background in digital strategy, data science, and fundraising, Starnes has played a pivotal role in developing programs that leverage technology and analytics to improve pet adoption rates.
During my interview with Starnes, I was struck by how this process could apply to business. What if companies treated their internal innovation marketplaces the same way?
How many game-changing ideas are lost in your company right now? How many employees have identified a pressing market need, only for the solution to sit—unshared, unknown, and wasted? If companies don’t fix the inefficiencies in their idea marketplaces, they’re not just slowing down innovation. They’re losing millions, even billions, in untapped potential.
The world’s most successful marketplaces— The RealReal, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit—provide organizations like Best Friends Animal Society with a blueprint for how to create frictionless systems that connect supply with demand instantly and efficiently.
Lessons from the World’s Most Efficient Marketplaces
The organizations that have built the most successful internal marketplaces all have one thing in common: they’ve mastered the art of connection. They don’t wait for people to find solutions—they push solutions to the right people at the right time.
1. Best Friends Animal Society: Turning Data into Lives Saved
Every year, thousands of dogs and cats sit in shelters despite so much public support for pet adoption. Most of the time these facilities lack a centralized, real-time system to connect animals with new homes. Groups like Best Friends are trying to solve the disconnect at the national level by helping shelters and communities work together.
Best Friends is approaching this by unifying shelter data, building predictive models, and better highlighting where animals are in need. The goal? A movement where sharing data in real time empowers people to save more lives in every community.
For adopters, bringing home a new pet is just the beginning. Companies like Earth Doggy help pet adopters by providing a community for rescue parents to learn, support and encourage one another. From organic treats to tips and tricks on integrating pets into new homes, Earth Doggy aims to ensure that every pet can enjoy a happy, healthy life while minimizing their environmental pawprint.
2. The RealReal: Making Luxury Resale Seamless
The RealReal took a fragmented, inefficient luxury resale market and turned it into a billion-dollar business. Before, people who wanted to sell high-end fashion had to navigate Craigslist, eBay, consignment stores, or social media groups—none of which were designed for seamless transactions. The RealReal solved this by a three-pronged approach.
Digitizing supply and demand: Cataloging luxury goods and creating a centralized inventory.
Using AI-powered recommendations: Matching buyers with pieces they were most likely to purchase.
Handling logistics: Offering authentication, shipping, and resale management.
By removing friction at every step, The RealReal didn’t just make buying and selling luxury easier—it made it inevitable.
3. Airbnb: Turning Spare Rooms into a $100 Billion Industry
Before Airbnb, people who had extra space had no easy way to connect with travelers. Renting out a room was complicated, required effort, and came with risks. Meanwhile, millions of travelers were searching for unique, affordable stays.
Airbnb built a trust-driven marketplace that made the process seamless:
Clear demand-supply connection: Travelers see real-time availability of homes.
Discovery mechanisms: Through search filters, algorithms, and personalized recommendations, users find exactly what they need.
Physical enablement: The platform offers logistics like secure payments, verified listings, and review systems to ensure trust.
By digitizing and optimizing the entire exchange process, Airbnb turned what was once a niche idea into a $100 billion industry.
4. TaskRabbit: Eliminating Friction in the Gig Economy
Before TaskRabbit, hiring someone for small jobs—assembling furniture, moving boxes, home repairs—was too difficult. People needed help, and skilled workers were available, but the two groups had no easy way to find each other.
TaskRabbit transformed this by:
Digitizing availability: Making sure demand and supply were always visible in real time.
Automating matching: Using AI to suggest the best taskers based on experience and proximity.
Streamlining payments and trust: Offering an easy, safe way to pay and review services.
The result? A seamless labor marketplace where supply always meets demand.
How Companies Can Apply These Lessons to Their Internal Marketplaces
If companies want to stop wasting innovation, they need to build internal marketplaces that function like Best Friends, The RealReal, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit. That means doing four things:
1. Quantify the Cost of Missed Ideas
How much value is lost because employees can’t find the right ideas? Companies need to measure how many potentially transformative innovations die in emails, unshared documents, or are simply missed due to inefficiency.
2. Digitize Information and Make It Searchable
Just like Best Friends Animal Society created a centralized data strategy to bring awareness to where animals and shelters needed help, businesses need to create a single, unified system to match needs and solutions.
3. Push Information, Don’t Wait for People to Search
In the best marketplaces, supply doesn’t sit around waiting to be found—it finds you.
Internal idea marketplaces should work the same way. Companies must use AI-driven autofill, search recommendations, and push notifications to surface ideas in real time.
4. Enable a Physical Marketplace with Incentives
Great marketplaces don’t just connect supply and demand digitally—they support the transaction in the real world.
Best Friends provides the motivation of saving lives.
Airbnb and The RealReal offer financial incentives.
TaskRabbit ensures seamless transactions with trust mechanisms.
Companies must offer real motivation for employees to participate. This could be commissions, recognition, career advancement, or even purpose-driven incentives like solving industry-changing problems.
Build a Marketplace, Not a Filing Cabinet
The world’s most efficient marketplaces don’t rely on passive search—they actively drive connections. They eliminate friction, digitize supply and demand, automate discovery, and create real-world incentives for participation.
Companies that fail to build high-functioning internal marketplaces will continue wasting their best ideas. The businesses that learn from Best Friends, The RealReal, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit—those that make innovation seamless and inevitable—will dominate the future.
The cost of inefficiency is too high. It’s time to fix your company’s marketplace.
For more insights on internal idea marketplaces or the intrinsic motivation that builds lasting organizations, visit Outthinker.