Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing harnesses the power of a community, using advanced social media technology and knowledge of crowd behaviour, to collect, evolve and rank ideas and contributions to reveal the strongest performers. Crowdsourcing can shorten time to market for new products, uncover ways to cut costs or improve service levels, and heighten market success for new products or enhancements. Companies, organizations and governments use crowdsourcing technology to most rapidly and economically understand market needs, opportunities and priorities.
Crowdsourcing – The Process
Crowdsourcing invites crowds to submit, discuss, refine and rank ideas or other contributions via the web to arrive at what have been proven economically as the most-likely-to-succeed solutions.
How Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article described it..."Crowdsourcing is the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of a specialized few."
As described by wikipedia..."Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem solving and production model. Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers via the Web in the form of an open call for solutions. Users--also known as the crowd--typically form into online communities based on the Web site, and the crowd submits solutions to the site. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones."
Eric Schmidt, Google CEO talks about crowdsourcing in Don Tapscott's Wikinomics, 2007 saying.. Peer production is about more than sitting down and having a nice conversation... It's about harnessing a new mode of production to take innovation and wealth creation to new levels.
What are the business benefits of crowdsourcing?
Simply put, you get the brightest ideas from the masses… you own those ideas… and you can apply them to your business to perform and often profit.
How are organizations using crowdsourcing?
There are four common ways that businesses apply crowdsourcing:
- Market prediction
- Product or business innovation
- Research discovery
- Brand Collaboration
Learn more about these business cases in our blog. Also see how we scored the crowdsourcing ROI by Intel, Procter & Gamble, Goldcorp and others.
How does crowdsourcing differ from online community?
Online community engages a crowd, whereas crowdsourcing gets the crowd to contribute. Web community gets members profiled and conversing, can give them access to resources, and creates a 2-way relationship the host organization.
Crowdsourcing is the means to tap communities for value. Crowdsourcing puts a call to the crowd to input ideas, vote, and help prioritize the highest value solutions or directions for the business. A community may contribute product ideas, direction on how to best enhance your business, produce ad creative for your brand or solve a problem that has stumped your internal team. It’s not unusual for the contribution of a crowd to be worth millions to an organization.
What’s the power of the crowd?
Studies described in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing and Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics show that a relatively uninformed crowd routinely out-predicts a group of experts in a room. It’s now proven that more innovation comes from the hobbyists and enthusiasts that are active online than a small group of experts collaborating in isolation.
See what business and thought leaders have to say on this topic – view Sound Bites.
Is crowdsourcing new?
The practice of tapping a crowd has long been used by business. In 1916 Planters Peanuts held a contest to develop its logo. What’s new about crowdsourcing is how it uses web 2.0 technology to rapidly, affordably reach a global crowd for open innovation. Crowdsourcing technology using sophisticated algorithms based on deep knowledge of human behavior, equips business to distill crowd input down to not just “what’s most popular” but what really is the economically most likely to succeed idea.
