Crowdfunding site Indiegogo yesterday announced a new service aimed at helping big businesses to gather funds for their Research & Development projects, validate new products and offer cash prizes to people who can propose new ideas for them to work on.

The new service is called “Enterprise Crowdfunding”, and will see the site expand beyond novice entrepreneurs and inventors. Now, people will be able to contribute to some of the world’s biggest companies, said Indiegogo’s CEO Slava Rubin at the CES Show in Las Vegas yesterday.

People might reasonably ask, why do big businesses need crowdfunding? After all, the whole point of Indiegogo and its main rival Kickstarter is to help those who lack funding find backers for their ideas. Big companies like General Electric Corp., for example, one of Indiegogo’s first enterprise partners, should surely be able to find some loose change to fund even its craziest new ideas.

But Rubin said in his keynote at CES that some big businesses want to outsource their R&D. The logic, he says, is that if people really, really want a new product, they’ll help by providing ideas and donating some money for companies to design them. In addition, crowdfunding will help companies to gauge the demand for new products.

“Indiegogo is a great testing ground to evaluate how the market is receiving their ideas,” Rubin enthused.

As mentioned, Indiegogo will begin working with General Electric, as well as companies like Harman International Industries Inc., Hasbro Inc. and Anheuser-Busch, which makes Shock Top beer. General Electric has already tested the new model with its Paragon Induction Cooktop, and will soon introduce newer products. Shock Top has also launched a campaign in the past called Shock the Drought. Harman meanwhile, is set to launch a crowdfunding campaign for a pair of selective noise cancellation headphones it has in the works.

It remains to be seen if people will actually want to pledge their money to big businesses such as these, but Indiegogo stands to benefit if they do, After all, by way of already being established companies, their campaigns have a lot more potential to bring in revenues if they succeed, and that means a lot more money for Indiegogo.

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