Spigit is a new business community tailored towards entrepreneurs wanting to post their new business and/or product ideas, gather feedback, form a team and running the idea through a market simulation game.

A “launchpad for emerging technologies”, the simulation engine gives the entrepreneurs an opportunity to test their ideas against simulated market forces with a share trading, review and voting system of Spigs (a thumbs up vote) and a Scrap (as it is obviously described).

“Through our proprietary simulation they can build and refine an idea, find the right resources to contribute, create buzz, and calculate a multitude of targeted metrics to provide insight into viability and simulate the likelihood of success. The spigit simulation engine measures and quantifies interactions on social networks. The spigit simulation engine captures dynamic feedback from all participants, tracking hundreds of dynamic events and through a series of algorithms, computes results producing valuable predictions and identifies key social connections to maximize professional and economic gains.”

With the Spigit business simulation, the entrepreneur has to go through 3 distinct stages - The Incubation, Validation and Emergence. The entrepreneur or founder of the business must complete several requirements, criterion and milestones to advance to the second and third stages. The 3rd stage allows the founder to pitch their ideas to believers for its IPO and managing the IPO ensuring maximum return on investment for all its sponsors and investors. The idea that gains the highest peak market capitalization over a quarter wins the game with a Spigit Splash! Award.

This is a useful and invaluable business exercise for the would be business. While creating a less risky scenario for judging public demand, it is a proving ground of sorts for new ideas so that entrepreneurs can decide whether or not an idea has legs before investing real time and money.

The only hesitation I would have in going through this simulation is the fact that ideas that are put out to the public as an imaginary company have the likelihood to be stolen by another person or company. At the moment, Spigit does not offer any special patent protection for the new ideas, therefore one must be careful and extremely comfortable with publicly putting your idea there. You may want to get legal advice on how to protect your idea or individual documents before exposing it on Spigit.

Spigit is co-founded by Paul Pluschkell (CEO) and Padmanabh Dabke (CTO) and is based in Pleasanton, California.