Crowdsourcing isn’t an all or nothing undertaking
Opening up your organzation to let the crowd in likely isn’t as difficult as you imagine. Instead of thinking about crowdsourcing as an all-or-nothing proposition, consider the different stages of innovation where crowd input could help you better perform:
- the crowd submits ideas – put a call out for ideas
- the crowd refines ideas – get people to evolve ideas they’ve created or you have
- the crowd comments/votes – assess preferences and gather input on crowd generated ideas or your own
- the crowd shortlists ideas – filter down from a mass list to crowd-preferred frontrunners
- the crowd picks winning idea – from shorlist the crowd creates or you do, get the crowd to rank the top favourite
There are lots of crowdsourcing instances where the crowd participates in all five ways to come up with a winning idea. You can get highly valuable data though, by inviting crowd contributions at just one or two points along the full crowdsourcing path.
Idea generation & favouriting – 1 & 3 Combo: What products and services do you want from us? What do we do best? If wondering how your customers see your brand, how satisfied they are with your service, or what they wish you would launch next to the market – just ask them. Suddenly you will have a vantage on demand, and your market rank that you never had before.
Make expert ideas market relevant – 2, 3, 4 Combo: If you still want to be at the helm of the idea-generation, you might get a crowd of experts to create new product ideas for example and then have the crowd refine and shortlist the ideas to things they want to buy, and maybe vote on what they’d pay for them.
Crowd winner pick – 5 only: Want to launch the product enhancement that most thrills your users? Why not share your top 5 enhancement ideas and let them pick what they want you to deliver. They could even vote with development dollars if they want to fund your technology build.
As soon as you let the crowd in, you’ll see the value of open innovation however small you start. Experimentation and high-value discovery and market prediction is what has led many organizations to make a whole-scale business shift to open innovation.
photo by: mistersnappy
