We weren’t really sure of the difference either, so we consulted Wikipedia. We learned that co-creation could be seen as creating great work by standing together with those for whom the project is intended. Scholars C K Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy introduced the idea of co-creation in their 2000 Harvard Business Review article, “Co-Opting Customer Competence”. They developed their arguments further in their book The Future of Competition.

Last year, Promise Corporation published the results of a systematic review of co-creation evidence, Co-creation: new pathways to value that was co-produced with LSE Enterprise. In it they attempted to distinguish co-creation from related concepts such as crowdsourcing, mass customisation and mass collaboration by insisting on the psychoanalytical, decision-making as well as innovation roots of the concept in its intellectual evolution. Their new definition of co-creation: “co-creation is an active, creative and social process, based on collaboration between producers and users, that is initiated by the firm to generate value for customers.”

Is there a difference between crowdsourcing, open innovation, mass collaboration and co-creation? We hate to be the ones that let the cat out of the bag, but not really. Some people are more comfortable with one term over another. We think it comes down to who’s book you’ll buy.

You can’t crowdsource anything without a crowd, but what groups of people might you think about for your crowdsourcing initiatives? What qualifies as a crowd and how many people do you need to get the results you are after?

Crowds worth considering…

Your employees/stakeholders – crowdsourcing all aspects of your your business – benefit as much as possible from your employees’ knowledge and experience, ask them what you should sell, how best to operate & deliver, who to partner with, who to recruit and so on. Crowd size will be determined by the size of your company. The method is more important than numbers in this case. The key to success here is flattening your organization so that every employee feels they can contribute their ideas.

Your customers – crowdsourcing products & services - getting direct feedback from your customers on what they want to spend money on – Crowd should be made up of people who are already passionate about your brand, people who are passionate about what you sell and (if possible) a few people that think what you do is horrible. Constructive criticism is good! To make this work, you’ll want to make sure you are rewarding the people who are helping you strengthen your business.

The broad public including expert outsiders – crowdsourcing innovation – bringing qualified diverse thinkers together to assess and discover solutions has proven to lead to breakthroughs. To achieve the critical mass of hobbyists, hecklers and experts for new thinking, you’ll want a healthy sized crowd - think thousands or tens of thousands. To make this work you’ll need people with a variety of backgrounds, as everyone will approach situations differently.

Citizens at large – crowdsourcing public policy – bringing democratic practices down to a grassroots level. Crowd size is dependent on number of citizens in the jurisdiction (city, country, voting ward). You’ll want to structure things so there is a good cross section of those directly affected by the policy, not just those with a keen interest in being politically active.

Photo courtesy: WiggyToo

There has been lots of talk of late about the death of major newspapers, but what exactly are the shifts underway in the news media, and how is the crowd coming in? Here are the four emerging trends we see.
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We are routinely asked by universities and business executives what we see coming next in crowdsourcing. As we watch the evolution of crowd-powered business, there are three models we see bubbling to the surface: core crowdsourcing companies crowdsourcing hubs attached to major enterprises and crowds for hire where organizations can post calls to pre-existing communities.
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For a business shift that’s about inviting in non-experts, hobbyists and hackers, there’s a lot of insider lingo around crowdsourcing. This begins the first of a series of straight talk on crowdsourcing principles to help us all put the theory into practice.

What is collective intelligence? Jeff Howe, the guy that came up with the term crowdsourcing, says it this way, “A central principle animating crowdsourcing is that the group contains more knowledge than individuals.” James Suroweicki says, “Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision.” This is the science that explains why when asked for a lifeline on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the crowd guesses 91% correctly, whereas experts have a 61% likelihood of getting the right answer. The answers that come from crowdsourcing are called collective intelligence or wisdom of crowds. Yes, two terms for the same thing.
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