What is crowdsourcing? What are its advantages and disadvantages?
What is crowdsourcing? Can it help organizations discover innovative ideas and/or talent?
Crowdsourcing allows you to tap into the collective intelligence of the crowd to improve innovation performance or discover new ideas.
According to a McKinsey survey, 6% of executives are satisfied with their firms’ innovation performance. When comes to organizational capabilities, lack of skill, talent, and the ability to execute ideas was mentioned frequently as a barrier to innovation. Without the right skills and capabilities, it’s difficult to achieve the desired results. This may be the primary reason why more companies are embracing the crowd.
Organizations leveraging crowdsourcing are some of the world’s most progressive and innovative like NASA, Lockheed Martin, Mozilla, XPrize, and SAP. You see challenges in different fields like design, engineering, manufacturing, predictive analysis, software development, video game development, mobile application, and much more.
The idea is to figure out ways to improve and enhance products or services so that they become twice as appealing to the market. However, despite the apparent benefits, only a few companies understand and capitalize on the true potential of crowdsourcing. The hesitation stems from the fact that the entire concept is still relatively new and can be perceived as risky, but so is stagnation and disruption. You can eliminate some of these risks by starting with smaller projects, according to Steve Rader, who is the deputy director of crowdsourced innovation at NASA. It’s a worthwhile exercise to discuss the reasons why more companies should begin to embrace the concept of crowdsourced challenges.
Crowdsourcing becomes an appealing option if companies face the following issues:
Inflexibility
The truth of the matter is that any corporation that exists has a foundation. There are departments that coordinate with one another on a professional level and assume responsibility for different aspects of the business. They have specific expertise and knowledge for the industry they are working in and assume complete responsibility for creation, production, and sales. Such a particular environment is often inflexible.
Role Definition
More often than not, all the employees of a corporation have clear roles and responsibilities that they are expected to fulfill. Additionally, their motivating factors are usually things like bonuses, raises, and promotions. Design and creativity are something that may not be valued as much, and people often don’t take the initiative to go beyond their job descriptions.
Burnout
There will always come a time when designers and innovators will reach a point of burnout after creating one hit after the next. This inability to come up with new ideas, upgrades, or enhancements can often create a backlog in the company.
How can crowdsourced innovations help?
There is a reason why many big companies like Apple opt for crowdsourcing; it is highly beneficial and useful. Through crowdsourcing, you will be able to achieve the following benefits:
True Feedback
The reality is, crowds have no such responsibility to the corporation and will not suffer the consequences of bad designs or suggestions. Similarly, they will also not be shy about feedback since they are the end receivers of the product or service. As such, you can expect honest feedback that will genuinely help you improve as a company.
Newer Perspectives
When you are crowdsourcing, you will be exposed to a diverse range of ideas, suggestions, and perspectives. Concepts like burnout are quickly resolved when you are feeding off the energy and innovation of others. This newer perspective is something that can be explosive for your company. The best part is that you can choose from a vast pool of ideas and perspectives.
Cost-Effective
The best part about crowdsourcing is that it is very cheap in comparison to all other alternatives –like hiring a new designer or innovator. Additionally, you will also save a lot of time and money by eliminating processes like brainstorming, validating, and the like. Thus, not only is it one of the best methods for coming up with new innovations, but it can also be more cost-effective.
A unique way to identify talent
When you post a challenge on Assist 2 Develop you engage our crowd/community. You will have access to a pool of engineers and designers who can help judge your challenge based on the criteria you specify which streamlines your selection process. Additionally, Instead of a cash prize for a new product idea or iteration, companies can reward the challenge participant with the most innovative approach by offering a full-time job, internship, or freelance contract.
In closing, I will quote Elena Simperl and from “How to Use Crowdsourcing Effectively: Guidelines and Examples”
As technology becomes more and more ubiquitous, many of the challenges we witness in any domain of our life, business, and society will soon require solutions that rely on both of these axes: a sophisticated combination of data-intensive, complex automation, and deep community involvement. This suggests the need for new types of systems to tackle these emerging challenges and for a thorough understanding of the science and engineering of (the continuum of) social machines.
