Top Takeaway:
Crowdsourcing: Fun? YES!
Value creation with staying power? Not quite sure yet on that one. Reports vary; inconclusive research. Looking forward to some [quantitative] follow-up research on quality and/or longer-term sustainability of innovation generated from this methodology, showing that crowdsourced innovations live on well beyond the PR phase.
Seems like there is something of great value here – as soon as Crowdsourcing becomes a more seriously managed business tool and a bit less of a free-for-all. [A start: Twitter rules!] Key point: Smart people really don’t like working for free. Pats on the back only go so far.
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Background:
What is crowdsourcing? (from www.lawfont.com)
“The idea of crowdsourcing is a play on the well-known practice of outsourcing. Outsourcing is most commonly known as the practice of substituting cheap labor from other countries to cut costs at home. It also has a more general meaning of simply using skills from outside a company where the company does not have the required expertise internally.
“Crowdsourcing” - a term coined by Wired author Jeff Howe – refers to the increasingly prevalent practice of using the skills and time of unpaid or low-paid amateurs to create content or solutions for established businesses. The general idea is to use the talents of the crowd, particularly people who are not necessarily employed in the industry with the problem to solve, but nonetheless have a talent that is valuable to that industry.”
Tapping into the “collective intelligence of the public at large” assumes one major factor is at hand — intelligence. Crowd behavior is a topic of endless academic and commercial research, as it has been for decades. History has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that crowds can behave very wisely or very unwisely, depending on who is giving the cues or leading the pack.
I totally agree with Jennifer Alsever’s observation that “people can and want to help your business.”
The strong advantage that rises to the top is that loyal users and consumers of existing products can and do have great ideas for incrementally improving current products. In today’s economy, an incremental improvement on any product or service that comes from a free (or low-cost) source is worth a lot.
A parallel strong concern that rises to the top is that the whole idea behind crowdsourcing is to push problems out to the general public and hope a brillant solution bubbles up. Sometimes it does.
Depending on the nature of the problem to be solved, the outcome could be anything from an idea your R&D folks thought of 20 years ago or . . . something so fantastically low-tech and obvious your R&D folks just could not think if it because it was too simple. Or maybe somewhere in the middle – obviously.
I don’t want to be the one to rule out the rocket-scientist-in-hiding who might be the one to pop into your public innovation discussion. Real people do win the lottery, after all. It is my personal opinion that basements and garages and top desk drawers are chock full of brilliant ideas that could change the world if independent inventors had a simpler-to-cross bridge between their ideas and commercialization.
I also don’t underestimate the intelligence of innovative thinkers, and personally I don’t think some of those brilliant basement and garage inventors actually WANT big companies to gobble up their great idea in exchange for a “windfall” of $100 and a mention on page B1 in their local paper.
I am however, a major fan of Expertsourcing [Expert Sourcing], which is defined as sourcing ideas/solutions from specialized, professional-grade, vetted experts.
Brokering and managing Expertsourcing transactions have sprung up as a brillant new business service platform. Companies in the space include:
Innocentive (Problems issued to recruited scientists)
NineSigma (Sends out RFPs to network of universities, inventors, businesses)
YourEncore (Posts projects to retired technical people)
yet2 (Matching and providing services/resources to IP buyers/sellers)
There are more now, and others will be coming. Brilliant.
With the great new wave of ideas being mined “almost for free” from the public by large corporations, we might expect to see some backlash down the road from great minds with great ideas who don’t feel like being taken for a free ride by corporations but who possess the very basic human need of being valued for their contributions to society.
No doubt the evolution of Web 2.0 and Innovation Management methodologies will provide great reading as it evolves and segments into a network of proven and sustainable solutions for using the collective intelligence.
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Credits:
Jennifer Alsever on Crowdsourcing as “a very real and important business idea”: http://www.bnet.com/2403-13241_23-52961.html
Crowdsourcing: Blog by Jeff Howe, contributing editor at Wired magazine, who coined the term in June 2006.
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything: Book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams that offers a guide for mass collaboration among customers, suppliers, and producers.
Tom Powell on Expert Sourcing: http://coinnovative.com/part-6-expert-sourcing-for-problem-solving-and-innovation/
Filed under: Social Media + Innovation Tagged: | collective customer commitment, crowdcasting, crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing, Expertsource, fansourcing, Ideagoras, mass collaboration, open innovation, open sourcing, Prosumers, wikinomics, Worksource
