Barry Nalebuff is the Milton Steinbach Professor of Economics and Management at Yale School of Management. An expert on game theory, he has written extensively on its application to business strategy. Ian Ayres is an economist and a lawyer. He is the Townsend Professor at Yale Law School. Professor Ayres has been ranked as one of the most prolific and most cited law professors of his generation. Together they wrote Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small. 
The authors have also launched a website with the "Why Not?" brand called "Why Not Open Source Movement." Here is how they discribe thier project:
By and large, Americans are optimists. We like to believe that anything is possible. Conquering polio, traveling to the moon, and creating the Web are but a few notable examples of the triumph of imagination and ingenuity.
Alas, with the dotcom crash and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, our optimism has flagged. Now our spirit of ingenuity needs reviving. Robert F. Kennedy famously challenged us to dream of things that never were and say, 'Why not?' By allowing ourselves to dream, we lift not only our morale but our economy too. To jump-start innovation again, we need an open-source movement for ideas.
Linus Torvalds proved the power of unleashing intellectual property when he posted the source code for his Linux operating system on the Internet. The same approach -- giving away ideas -- could be a powerful engine of economic and social change. In our new book, Why Not?, we offer up hundreds of ideas for new products and services, and put them out there free and clear for the taking.
Of all the ideas in Why Not?, the biggest is our desire to incite a why-not movement. It starts at www.whynot.net, an online forum for people to share and talk about their ideas, be they big or small, practical or blue-sky. Which ones do you like and why? How could they be improved? The site is literally an idea free-for-all, where participants can help develop each other's brainstorms, notions, and shower-time inspirations.
The site allow you to post your own ideas. The site is not the first of its kind. The Global Idea Bank has been around for a decade. What is unique that the authors concept of the question, "Why Not" as a starting place for idea generation.
