However, a perhaps less-used definition is actually the original one, coined by Alvin Toffler back in 1980, who first identified a prosumer as one who is highly interested in a particular product, service or brand, and wants to become involved with it to help fashion its future. In other words – a “proactive consumer”.

It is Alvin Toffler’s definition of “prosumer” that is highly relevant to crowdsourcing as it enables the identification of these individuals, who can be immensely valuable to any organization. Prosumers are often word-of-mouth powerhouses that can influence a large number of people and therefore promote your product, service or cause.  They are also consumers or advocates who can become actively involved in the design or production of a good or service, or simply raise awareness of a movement by helping to shape its impact regionally, or globally.

So how does this all fit into crowdsourcing?  Crowdsourcing is perhaps the most effective way to identify the prosumers, to bring them into your brand (or cause) and give them a meaningful way to engage, contribute and grow their relationship with you. Crowdsourcing can also provide a way to bring prosumers together with other prosumers and engage on innovation and co-creation initiatives. Prosumers can be hidden assets for any organization, but through crowdsourcing you can make them known to your company, and begin to build lasting, highly productive and mutually rewarding relationships.

What can prosumers do for you?

Prosumers can contribute in three major ways to your organization: through abundant feedback and input, insightful conversations in consumer groups focused around brands and ideas, and ultimately, co-creation and open innovation.  Therefore prosumers will touch three key aspects of your business: market research, brand and innovation; and successful crowdsourcing programs do just that, enable any form of contribution from the crowd through microtasks to hands on co-creation.

Prosumers are most insightful in co-creation by providing real-life feedback in testing new concepts before rolling them out to the market. Prosumers can also raise awareness or elevate a cause in their network and are motivated more by the bond with your organization than they are by awards or external incentives. We often give prosumers a special role in our crowdsourcing programs – by inviting them into private areas for hands-on innovation or acknowledging them through brand affiliated reputation and/or influence.

Our team has aspirations for some of the brands we touch every day, like RIM, Air Canada, Rogers, Shaw, and HSBC as they have so much to gain from their prosumers that are just waiting to be invited in.  We’d love to help them to build their communities or make their brands participative.

As for the rest of you, take a step – a bold step – and extend an invitation to your consumers both current and future via social channels, mobile and web-enabled engagement; capture all that they are trying very hard to contribute, and remember to acknowledge and reward them.  There is no better investment for your brand, products, services or cause – we’ll see many cases studies of ROI very soon.

Originally posted on The Daily Crowdsource here.

Predictive. It begs the question, what makes a legendary CEO different than anyone else? How can this person be so good as to change the fate of an entire market? There is one very important ingredient: the ability to predict the future. I’m not suggesting that Bill Gates held seances and looked into a crystal ball before investing his life into Microsoft, but I am suggesting that he had a pretty good idea of what he was doing. The ability to absorb huge amounts of information and make accurate judgements about them leads the CEO to make smart, and ultimately successful, decisions.

Resilient. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows in the land of the CEO. They are often asked to endure punishing travel and meeting schedules. And there is no room for a bad performance for any reason. At this level, you need to be on your game at all times. And what if you’re not? That’s right, even CEO’s can be fired. Yahoo‘s Carol Bartz was fired abruptly, leading to a huge stock market jump for the company. It is a very bad sign when everybody wants some of your ex-company’s stock just after you are fired. For a CEO, this is part of the job. You put yourself back together, and try again.

Inspirational. CEO’s are not self-contained entities. It is meaningless to have a leader without a team. And team performance is often just as (or more) important than the forward thinking actions of the CEO. Think of the CEO like a helium balloon attached to the company by a string. If they pull at just the right times, in just the right ways, they can guide everything to great outcomes. If they pull too hard, or in the wrong directions, or at the wrong times, they won’t achieve the action or direction they were hoping for. A legendary CEO will rally their team to achieve amazing outcomes, and appear relaxed and at ease. Finesse will ultimately be the measure by which they are judged.

Here at Chaordix we are lucky to have a CEO with all of these qualities. Thank you to Shelley Kuipers for your excellent leadership!

The great news is that, in almost all cases we meet or exceed the goals we set for participation and contribution.  Amazing you think?  It’s all in the objective, design, incentives and engagement strategy.

There are a lot of demands for people’s time and we all know we don’t have nearly enough time to do all the things we want to do.  On the other hand, if we can do something quickly and easily, and it is something that interests us, its highly likely we’ll do it.

That’s the basis of how successful crowdsourcing programs are designed.  The first part of that is ensuring that your objectives are achievable, actionable and represent something that we believe will be compelling and meaningful to the crowd.  Then we help select and recruit the target crowd that is most likely to care about the subject matter, and develop an incentive program accordingly.  (Note – here at Chaordix, we are not big fans of big prize incentives, rather, we use a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic incentives of nominal value, more to make it fun and provide some reward, but not to attract people just for the prizes. We want to attract people who care and want to participate).

The second step is to make sure the crowdsourcing experience is intuitive, so it makes it easy for people to join and being participating in minutes, without having to read long pages of instructions or take a training session.  Lastly, making the engagement compelling with good invitation messages, clear and timely communication and notification, and sharing the progress with the crowd.

The results?  Your program can drive a lot of participation.  With one recent campaign we sent one email to 10,000 + potential participants, and in the first 24 hours alone had over 2,000 people jump in and participate.  Our Chicago Sun Shine Project  program has exceeded 10,000 participants in just a few weeks, starting from scratch.

So if you are holding off on running a crowdsourcing program due to fear that no one will come.  Build it right, and they will come.

Originally posted on The Daily Crowdsource - October 12, 2011. Read the article at http://dailycrowdsource.com/2011/10/12/crowd-leaders/crowd-leader-shelley-kuipers-the-magic-of-participation/

As a bit of background, the Chicago Sun Times Charity Trust (the foundation arm of Sun-Times Media), wanted to engage their readers, and other people in the greater Chicago area to become more aware of the different not for profit organizations focused on youth education, art and civic engagement.  The purpose of the Chicago Sun Shine Project was to provide a platform for locals to nominate and influence the selection of which charities, organizations and projects they feel the foundation should support.  Participants, local non-profits and others were invited to “shine a light” on the charities and causes for consideration of support of grants that will total up to $500,000.

By Ernst Vikne http://www.flickr.com/photos/42834622@N00/4854165817/

The nomination of charities took place during the first month of the campaign. Nominated organizations were contacted and invited to submit their grant requests. During this time, organizations could also make their own submissions.

We’re currently in the voting period, which means all submissions are in and members of the public are having their voices heard in terms of which organizations they believe deserve the grant money. This voting phase runs until October 9th. Following the voting phase, the Charity Trust will assess the submissions as well as crowd votes and comments to help determine the allocation of funding. Winning submissions will be announced early November.

To-date, there have been over 150 grant submissions, and we’ve had over 3,800 comments and 8,800 votes. It’s been pretty exciting and inspiring to see how engaged these organizations have been in this process. Almost all of the organizations involved have used social media one way or another to promote their submissions. Many of the organizations have messages on their sites encouraging supporters to join in and vote.  Even if participating organization do not receive some of the grant funding, our hope is that this process has shed some light on their organization – which was a core goal of the initiative. So check out the site, and take a look at some really neat organizations doing some good in the Chicago area!

Is that something you’ve said, or heard said in your company?    We’ve heard it from many of our clients and potential clients, and doubtless, most of us have experiences with collaboration attempts that started out OK, but somehow, well, fizzled out.

For example, perhaps someone set up a wiki for a group project.   People probably started piling stuff into it, but quickly it became disorganized, and hard to find what you wanted, so it fell into disuse and people went back to the old email-blast collaboration technique.   Or perhaps you had an idea management tool that was designed to capture everyone’s new ideas whenever they had them.  But it was always unclear what, if anything, happened to the ideas, so again, people stopped using it.

We’ve heard all these stories and many more, and often get asked “how is crowdsourced collaboration different?”  The answer is in the process.  If you’ve followed Chaordix, or attended any of our webinar series, you know we believe strongly that the crowdsourcing model, or process, that is applied for a specific crowdsourcing objective is as important as, if not more important than, the technology that supports it.

Successful crowdsourcing is way more than just getting people to suggest ideas to a common online area.    It’s a well thought-out (ahead of time!) process where there are specific stages of idea submission, enhancement, and selection by the crowd, a panel, or combinations of both.   It requires having specific goals for the crowd to accomplish.  It involves communication mechanism that provide just the right amount of information to keep people in the loop and participating, without overwhelming them.  It incorporates incentives that make participating rewarding and fun.   And its also about making the goal, process and incentives transparent, so everyone knows how it’s going to work, how long it’s going to take and what the outcome is going to be.  It’s about getting the crowd to collaborate with a specific purpose in a specific period of time, with a technology platform and moderation that provide the essential ingredients.

Successful collaboration doesn’t happen by just bringing people together and saying “collaborate”.  Successful collaboration happens by good design, knowledgeable implementation and ongoing moderation/oversight.

And the best part is, it feeds on itself.  If you run a successful crowdsourcing engagement, and the crowd sees the progress and results,  the crowd members are that much more motivated to participate again, and again.

So, if you’ve tried collaboration technologies in the past and they haven’t worked out the way you thought they would, think about why they might have failed and think about the process used (or lack thereof).   But certainly, don’t assume that crowdsourcing is the same.    Crowdsourced collaboration, implemented correctly,  is truly different (and it works.)

In a recent chat with a crowdsourcing-knowledgeable innovator within a large enterprise, he shared good honest dialog about the open innovation benefits he’s seen in his organization, and also the challenges he faces.   The two biggest challenges he mentioned are:  1)  getting other organizations inside the enterprise to embrace the concept of open innovation and get engaged, and 2) dealing with the resistance in the legal department in their organization.

These are common issues that we hear about frequently from innovation champions, and these issues beg the larger question:  How do you get rolling with open innovation in a large organization given the resistance?

I’m going to wager that if you have “innovation” in your title and you are in a larger enterprise, you have been contemplating just this question (and facing these challenges).  You’re not alone.

Start off with the right mindset:  Think of your initial crowdsourcing project(s) not so much as ones that will drive that “breakthrough idea” but more  to build the proof-points on which you can build.  You want to be as sure as you can that your initial crowdsourcing projects are successful, and it helps you to build that internal support you need to share the benefits of crowdsourcing enterprise-wide.  So how to you stack the deck in your favor?

Here is some guidance we often give to our clients and prospective clients with regards to their initial open innovation projects:

Start small

One of the major sources of resistance to open innovation inside of an enterprise is that it is unknown.  People don’t understand the open innovation process, and they don’t know what to expect from it.   So, to reduce that concern, start small.   For your first crowdsourcing initiative shoot for 300 – 500 participants, over a limited time period of maybe one to two months.   One of the things we’ve learned over the past five years is that you still can drive great results from a small but engaged crowd.  In fact, if done correctly the quality of the results would be difficult to surpass even with a much larger crowd.  More ideas aren’t always better.    Smaller crowds are easier to recruit, easier to motivate and easier to moderate, and will often display much higher than average participation levels.

Start simple

There are likely all sorts of potential applications for crowdsourcing and open innovation within your organization.  Some of which might involve solving complex problems that you’ve been having trouble with; problems that may be preventing business growth. So the potential payout is high.  But these types of open innovation challenges often have a lower success rate, and can require some specific expertise on the part of the crowd.   They are still worth doing, but not as your first open innovation challenge.  Rather think of challenges that have a much higher rate of success – such as challenges to enhance current products or services, improve business operations, or identify new business models, for example.  For each of these, a well-designed and executed challenge is almost guaranteed to yield valuable results, and provide the proof point you need.

Start Inside

As we’ve noted in past posts, crowds almost always behave very well in a crowdsourcing site, and respect IP and legal terms (we have yet to hear a report of a “stolen idea”).  Yet, we understand legal departments tend to worry about protection of IP and difficulties in transferring IP created to the company.   So we suggest you start “safe” by reaching out to an internal crowd.   Your company presumably has an existing relationship regarding IP ownership with your employees, and this can be reinforced with the terms of the challenge engagement itself.   While the IP relationship with external crowds is well understood at this point and the legal worry isn’t really justified, its usually much easier to get legal to bless an initial project with a “safe” internal crowd.   Plus you get the added benefits that internal crowds often participate at even higher rates  and you’ll build internal goodwill by allowing wider employee participation in something of meaning to the company.

Since you’ll be learning a lot from your first open innovation project as well, keeping it small, simple and inside means that you have to worry less about the project and can focus more on enhancing your own experience and expertise.   If you’ve followed Chaordix for a while, you know that another thing we’re fond of saying is “We make crowdsourcing simple”, and we mean what we say.    What ideas do you have for first steps with open innovation in 2011?

While adopting crowdsourcing for innovation certainly can lead to breakthrough ideas, solutions and crowd efforts, I believe there is too much focus on the breakthrough and not enough value assigned to the many other benefits of engaging your stakeholders using crowdsoucing methods. In fact, even if a breakthrough is unlikely, there are still ample reasons to begin crowdsourcing. Here are a few:

Seed concepts: If you are looking for that next great idea or solution, crowdsourcing will help you get there even if the crowd itself doesn’t come up with it directly. The crowd will definitely spur your thinking, get you out of your rut, and perhaps plant the seed of a new idea or concept that will blossom into the breakthrough idea you are seeking.

Market validation: All companies have hunches – but often don’t have the proof of whether their hunches are right or not. At a bare minimum, crowdsourcing will confirm some of the hunches you have, and even better, help you refine your hunches into market proven data points. Or it will warn you that your hunch is wrong and prevent a potentially costly mistake.

Organizational learning: Edward Boches of Mullen put it best when he said “The consumer has already decided. They are creating content. Any brand or marketer that doesn’t take advantage of that in a way that will work for them is crazy.“ Consumers are wanting to have a say in the brands and services they consume and that trend is only increasing. Recent episodes like The Gap’s logo re-do fiasco show that companies need to hone their ability to engage their crowds and benefit from the input they WANT to give you. If you don’t get good at it, your competitor will for sure. So start early and start now. Begin figuring out how your organization can tap its crowds, perhaps starting with your internal crowd, for competitive advantage. As with many things, with crowdsourcing improvement comes with experience, so jump in, and maybe seek the council of someone who has experience to make your first effort successful.

And there are other benefits such as gaining a much deeper understanding of your crowd – how emotionally connect to you brand are they? Building goodwill with the marketplace for seeking input and acting on it is another benefit. Establishing a connection that you could potentially re-use over and over again for different innovation and research purposes.

Certainly don’t stop seeking the breakthrough or game-changing ideas, but also don’t fully measure your innovation efforts based on whether it delivers that breakthrough. Look beyond to the other benefits, communicate them widely, and you’ll see how your open innovation efforts are propelling your organization forward.

Consumers are speeding product development & reducing market failures

Heading into Christmas buying blitz 2010, it’s fun to try to predict what will be the bestsellers. Remember last year it was Wii everything? What will it be this year? Sing-a-Ma-Jigs?

It’s interesting to hear in January what’s sold most, but it’s game-changing for retailers to be able to predict demand.  Consumer-driven product co-creation and crowdsourcing are both leading the way and  and leading to more profit all the time.

It used to be that retailers and manufacturers would do their best guessing on what would be popular with focus groups or surveys used along the way and deep analysis of historic buying patterns. But looking backwards to guess what will be hot next – that’s seriously risky!

And why guess? A 2010 Forester study reported: 61% percent of all US online adults are willing co-creators.  One of the upsides of the participative brand phenomena is consumers are getting in at the product ideation and product concept stages to advise on and filter out the hot and not. This is old news to Dell and Threadless, but still catching on industry wide.

The resulting revenue opportunity is large and propelling a shift: a consumer community of about 400,000 members came up with the Muji Body-Fit Sofa that racked up $15.5 million annual sales – 5 times revenue average for the sofa category.

One group we’re working with is inviting consumers to dream up and co-create products that it will manufacture and distribute across a retailer network. Genius Crowds is starting with college room product ideas – think Memory Foam Lounge Chair – and moving on to home, pets and so on.  Check it out - www.geniuscrowds.com.

What’s promising about Genius Crowds is that they share the wealth with their crowd of inventors – either in crowd favourite earnings or long-term royalties (this is what has kept Threadless thriving). Beyond that – they are freeing people to talk about not one brand of products – like Dell or IKEA – but any brand, which can make the exchange really interesting. And in the age of competition for the crowd – interesting matters big.

So the race is on for retailers and manufacturers to open to consumers. The next Zhu Zhu pet… here we come, and faster!

(I love the spike in 2006 right after Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing book was published. )

So for all this hype, expectations are perhaps getting a bit out of hand.    Yesterday I read a blog post saying that crowdsourcing really isn’t all that useful for humanitarian efforts.   Isn’t it just a bit early to declare that?   That’s kind of like concluding in 1990 the Internet isn’t all that useful.

We all hear daily about great examples of success with crowdsourcing (and some not as successful) but let’s remember we are still very early on.  I’ll be the first to say we don’t have all of the answers, yet.  There is so much more to discover, learn and improve on for tapping collective wisdom.  We constantly come up with new crowdsourcing models, adjust incentives, voting styles, and find better ways of analyzing the data that results,  and there is just SO much more room for growth.

That’s what makes what we do here at Chaordix so exciting.   Not that there is so much hype, but that we know the best is yet to come.  So maybe Ushahidi isn’t that useful for the relief aid worker on the street today, but in the future, I’m positive relief agencies will learn how to use this valuable crowdsourced information and network for their benefit,  and the benefit of the victims of natural disasters.   Just as I’m equally sure for everyone reading this post, your company or organization will also soon be benefiting from some sort of crowdsourcing in the not too distant future. (even if it’s just to design your next donut.)

When talking about crowdsourcing, co-creation and innovation, very rarely do “baby boomers” enter the conversation as the target audience. However, a new Neilson report sheds light on the untapped potential of this populous generation. Interestingly, over 1/3 of users online are Boomers. Moreover, they use the same communication and social media platforms as younger adults. They are, on average, more affluent than Millennials and spend online readily. Leveraging, measuring interest, and co-creating with this generation via crowdsourcing is a great way to both engage and build your brand with Boomers. Here are a few ideas the Chaordix team has thought up for how the boomer and beyond demographic might be leveraged as a crowdsourcing community.

Co-creating new vacation products
As boomers retire, they’ll be looking for vacation ideas, getaways, escapes, cruises and guided tours. By leveraging crowdsourcing to search out and test new vacation products to appeal to a young-at-heart crowd, potential for product innovation and therefore a competitive edge is high. This could help online booking companies offer unique products and packages specifically tailored to a demographic that now has more time and money to travel than ever before.

Developing new financial products
Many retirees (or potential retirees) are looking to investments to create income and wealth as they enjoy their retirement. In leveraging a crowd and listening to what their retirement looks like now companies can create investment opportunities, insurance products or other financial products and moreover build relationships with affluent potential customers.

Advising your business on retaining their Boomer Generation employees
Who better to tell you how to keep your employees from retiring (or worse, exercising early-retirement) when you need them than those who sit at that very cusp? By leveraging a Boomer Generation employee community to advise how what would keep them in the workplace longer, companies can stave off brain drain and buy time for their younger employees grow more experienced.

Developing websites better suited for Boomer Generation audiences
Let’s face it: the generation of digital natives (read: Millenials & late Gen Xers) see the world differently, having grown up in a world where they are inundated with information, blinking imagery and constant calls for their attention. As such they read the world differently, scanning rather than taking time to absorb information when reading, sporadically searching instead of reading traditionally (left to right, top to bottom). And many websites are designed as both a response and result of the way digital natives take the world in. But with the huge adoption of the affluent & tech savvy Boomer Generation, making websites Boomer friendly should be a priority to any company looking to build relationships with this cohort. Through a crowdsourcing community of Boomers, businesses can develop sites to best appeal to this generation, and go beyond generating leads to generating sales.

These are just a few ideas of how businesses can leverage a crowdsourcing Boomer generation, in the most general and obvious terms. With all that said, if you’ve got a company and want to reach out to this generation online, give us a shout, and we’d love to throw some ideas to you.

Photo credit: X-Ray Delta One