Crowdsourcing as a Mechanism to Engage Diverse Contributors
Originally published on hirediversity.us January 10, 2018
By Tammi Wark Marcoullier — Open Innovation Strategy and Leadership
If you’ve ever looked at a problem and said, “I can fix that,” then you need to know about open innovation. Specifically, programs and competitions sponsored by federal agencies.
Wait, wait, wait!
Before you jump to the dearth of problems with government — contracting, behemoth hurdles, and the myriad red tape, let me tell you about a little known and fast-growing niche that aggressively seeks and rewards diversity in participants and solutions — crowdsourcing with challenge competitions.
There are technical, scientific, and creative solutions needed for hundreds of issues every year and the key factor is that instead of agencies and companies looking at only inside knowledge, established experts, or contractors for the answer, they’re seeking solutions from a broad base of people from around the world — the wisdom of the crowd. To participate, the barrier to entry is extremely low; often as simple as creating a username and password for the websites that host these programs. In many platforms, submissions are anonymized.
This means that no one is looking at your education and training credentials, where you live, what you do for work, your gender, age, ethnicity, experience, or any other factors. In the best of open innovation, participation and collaboration is open to anyone who wants to opt in for the initial call for solutions.
Another difference with the crowdsourcing programs is that organizers are aware there is more than one viable solution. In the most successful programs, a breadth of diverse solutions are awarded — five, ten, twenty or more. Diverse solutions come from diverse people, experiences, and ways of approaching things.
There is validation in seeing more than one way to accomplish a goal. Over time, those could be combined or refined in a way that a few or one end up in the marketplace, but it means we are not placing all our bets on a one-and-done. That is a greater risk — the linear, singular path to a solution.
Engaging Diverse Populations
For the last ten years, engaging people to bring unique and diverse voices and solutions to problems has been my passion and mission. I left the private sector world of startups and digital strategy to lead the newly launched Challenge.gov with our partners at DevPost.com and a handful of federal agencies in early 2011. In the initial five years, we collaborated on more than 700 prize competitions with 250,000+ citizens who shared their passions and expertise with 120 federal agencies to accelerate innovation in this country. The winners included individuals and companies earning anywhere from $500 to millions of dollars, totalling $250 million in prize money by 2016.
I’m confident that these programs are also a gateway to more diverse hiring and contracting. Read this excerpt about experimentation and hiring from the New York Times article, Why Trying New Things Is So Hard to Do:
“This is true not only in our personal lives. Executives and policymakers fail to experiment in their jobs, and these failures can be particularly costly. For example, in hiring, executives often apply their preconceived notions of which applicants will be a “good fit” as prospective employees. Yet those presumptions are nothing more than guesses and are rarely given the scrutiny of experimentation.
Hiring someone who doesn’t appear to be a good fit is surely risky, yet it might also prove the presumptions wrong, an outcome that is especially valuable when these presumptions amount to built-in advantages for men or whites or people from economically or culturally advantaged backgrounds.
For government policymakers, experimentation is a thorny issue. We are right to be wary of “experimenting” in the sense of playing with people’s lives. Yet we should also be wary of an automatic bias in favor of the status quo. That can amount to a Panglossian belief that the current policy is best, whereas the current policy may actually be a wobbly structure held together by overconfidence, historical accident and the power of precedent.”
Experiment we must. To break biases. To drive diversity. To challenge the status quo.
Among the long-view findings from NASA’s Center for Excellence in Collaborative Innovation and Harvard’s Crowd Innovation Lab is that the greatest success doesn’t always come from within industry, but from tangential and connected skills and abilities that are contributed from the layers outside the core problem. Someone or their skills may not be an exact match with the problem space, but those in the periphery or something similar are critical to success.
An example:
There was a competition to find a more reliable way to track fish. The system in place could cost hundreds of dollars per fish — each had to be caught, tagged, and released knowing that somewhere along the way, a bear could eat it and the sensor would be walking out of water. Talk about unreliable data… Fish populations show the health of an ecosystem, trends in lifespan, and help with recreational businesses. It is also a unique environment with water, climate, feeding patterns of predators, and limits with sensors.
Some believed that only experts in this industry would be able to come up with viable solutions. Running the $20,000 competition was an experiment. What could shake up the industry and possibly result in costs savings and increased reliability in data? In the end, a mobile device engineer provided a winning solution that was completely unique and diverse from anything industry was working on. It wasn’t just about fish specifically, it was about tracking technology in moving bodies. And of course that winner earned a reward was invited to talk with the companies that held the contracts.
When you find an opportunity that looks interesting to you and a match for your skills, don’t hesitate to jump in and see what you can do.
Risks and Rewards
Now, a reality check. I don’t think we should abdicate our values and value in the marketplace. Know the risks and weigh them against the potential rewards.
Among the criticisms of crowdsourcing is that people are expected to work for free. If you want a guarantee, this might not be the space for you. And that is OK. Go for the contracts and steady work with clients. But if you are already working on a solution for the problem space and participating or winning could:
- enhance your funding,
- provide exposure to collaborators, or
- validate a business opportunity you were exploring,
consider it.
If there is a tweak to what you’re already doing that would involve a tolerable level of effort on your part, consider it.
If you’re super competitive and want to showcase your expertise or even try something totally outside your comfort zone, consider it.
Think of all the paths to awareness of your awesomeness, skills, and abilities, and consider that via crowdsourcing you could be exposed to opportunities with people and organizations that have clearly defined a business opportunity.
If you are a hiring manager and your company uses crowdsourcing to engage talent beyond your immediate staff, take the time to meet your contributors and consider bringing them into the fold for future projects.
Every contributor, every voice, every new idea adds value. You are invited to the collaboration space and we welcome your contributions.
About Tammi Marcoullier
Tammi Marcoullier is an award-winning leader in open innovation and public engagement. She and her team recently launched an innovation accelerator at a lab in Boulder, Colorado, that is focusing on advancing research and development in virtual reality, user interfaces, data analytics, and mobile telecommunications. Ms. Marcoullier managed the federal-wide crowdsourcing program, Challenge.gov, for 5 years; earning the Harvard Innovations in American Government Award in 2014 for groundbreaking work building the program across government to engage millions of people in solving scientific, technical and creative problems. Her expertise in strategy, policy, implementation, and citizen engagement led to work advising foreign governments on policy, technology, and procedures to launch their open innovation programs. Ms. Marcoullier has executive leadership experience working for technology start-up companies and major media organizations (including USA Today, WashingtonPost.com, and AOL). In 2002 she published a book about the first U.S. women’s Olympic bobsled team. Ms. Marcoullier received her Bachelor of Arts in English, with a concentration in Film and Media Studies from George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, and was a Senior Fellow, Excellence in Government with the Partnership for Public Service 2012–2013, earning the 2015 BAIR Award for Ingenuity and Results.
