In this 4 P’s Marketing Mix series, we will break down what it means to build a marketplace from both the enterprise and entrepreneur sides. This article is an extended version of the Project section as seen through the lens of an enterprise.

Some think of engineers and designers as people who prefer to work alone. When you think of an IT specialist, what’s the first image that comes into your mind? An engineer by himself in a fluorescently lit room, staring at a computer screen filled with ones and zeros and brightly colored graphs. The truth is technical workers, like everybody else, enjoy collaborating with others, so how can a marketplace facilitate this? By integrating technology to the needs of enterprise companies looking to connect their community.

Think of how beneficial a development mesh could be for connecting engineers or those from any industry vertical across the world. It is hard to work in a bubble especially in engineering where there are multiple levels between the start and finish of a product. Think of how useful a project based marketplace could be for businesses that focus on bringing a product to market.

Engineers and designers work remotely for enterprises so it can be challenging to structure collaboration across global borders. It can be costly and time consuming to organize meetings and create groups as the CEO or president of a company. You might think, isn’t the Internet the perfect framework for connecting with other people in your field? You’re onto something. The Internet, or ATRANET as it was first called, was initially built to connect people within a tightly woven web to aid in internal communication. The Internet today, however, has expanded far beyond the network of a few servers and using it to connect specific people in an organized way is much more complicated. In fact the “Internet of Things” is allowing almost any object that has electricity in it to be connected and aware so that people are able to orchestrate their entire daily lives in a way that has devices reacting to their comings and goings throughout their day, seamlessly and even prediction ‘what next’ before it happens.  

“Hi Sylvia. Your cappuccino is ready. The room temperature is now 68 degrees as you like it. We just ordered a refill of vegetables -- they should arrive via a self-driving car delivery in 5 mins.”

Therefore collaboration across teams, working on projects to drive innovation in the connected world, is a powerful way for Enterprises to facilitate these communities and see in real-time the ideas and innovation that participants in these project marketplaces are discussing with others and building through global collaboration.

This is the reason why Near Me’s customizable marketplace technology is so important today. The Internet is now a very loosely woven mesh, making it hard for people with similar interests to find other experts in their field to collaborate with. It is true that within companies, applications such as Slack can facilitate group projects and a general dialogue between colleagues, but on a larger scale, say an enterprise brand wanting to connect engineers and designers in a network, a forum that runs on a robust platform is a key component for establishing, managing and monitoring projects.

The realization that engineers are social beings like the rest of us came to me after our CEO and head of QA flew over to catch up with our team of engineers in Poland. Although engineers may seem to work well alone, most welcome the opportunity to interact with their foreign colleagues as our team did. But international flights are costly and most companies are looking for more bang for their buck. Here’s why a project marketplace can help build a community around projects:

- Connect with others through a relevant topic

- Collaborate on projects by exchanging thoughts and feedback

- Outsource tasks to help prioritize

- Join groups based on skills and goals

In order to understand how a project based marketplace functions, let’s take a look at the Intel model which recently launched on our platform. Intel’s developer Mesh (devmesh.intel.com) allows the 20 million registered Intel developers around the world, to share their projects, collaborate with others, learn about topics, grow their network of talented IT specialists and create discussion groups (public, private and secret).  

Other enterprises that could benefit from this type of marketplace are any product or service based brand, who has currently lost connection with their communities or channel partners due to 3rd party services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Meetup, Upwork and other services, taking over their community connections.

There are countless industry verticals and communities of practices and associations, who need to provide:

- More member benefits without more membership levies

- Revenue opportunities to it’s members and the organization through marketplace functionality

- Be part of the conversation and not have a 3rd party own it, such as Facebook, LinkedIn or others.

Every industry vertical, from accounting and legal to plumbing and homesteading, has an opportunity to build thriving project based communities and marketplaces, without the development cost overhead -- and keep ownership of the data.