We had a similar idea that we executed on during Mega Startup Weekend recently that was a lot of fun. It is similar to crowd screening in a sense, but really is more of a crowd sourced business idea validation engine. Imagine if there was a community / website where you could pitch your idea, have people vote on it and refine it. You could release your idea to as small or large a group or circle that you felt comfortable with. The goal would be to build a "tribe" around your idea that helps you refine it and validate it. We wanted to bake in the whole lean startup methodology into it. For example we had a step in the process called "assumption junction" where the tribe would list all the assumptions in the business idea and rank them by risk/importance. The community would then be tapped for building/refining surveys as well as for distributing the surveys or taking them themselves. Imagine if ideas where refined and validated by hundreds if not thousands of people before a single line of code was written. We called the idea "The Darwin Project", where only the strongest ideas survive.
This really jibed with coders we surveyed as they would love to be approached with ideas that are validated before they wrote any code. This could be a tool that finally empowers the non-technical business guys to vet their idea, get a critical mass behind it, and finally build enough value in the idea itself to build a team around. If anybody is interested in pursuing this I can put you in touch with the team that is running with this concept.
This really jibed with coders we surveyed as they would love to be approached with ideas that are validated before they wrote any code. This could be a tool that finally empowers the non-technical business guys to vet their idea, get a critical mass behind it, and finally build enough value in the idea itself to build a team around. If anybody is interested in pursuing this I can put you in touch with the team that is running with this concept.