The phenomenon of crowd-sourcing is very interesting. If you have a great team of motivated people working together for a common cause, you can achieve wonders. The internet through crowd-sourcing does just that. Distances, time-zones and national boundaries are no longer relevant. Crowd-sourcing is going to disrupt a lot of businesses. Some examples spring to mind:
- Wikipedia
- Education sites like Khan Academy, Coursera and Codeacademy
- Amazon Vine program
- Communispace
- CrowdSpring for design sourcing
- Kickstarter for venture funding
Internet is bringing together masses of people who are interested and passionate about specific topics. It is accelerating globalization. After the services revolution, companies must plan for the crowd-sourcing revolution.
How businesses can benefit from crowd-sourcing
For a company, it makes sense to embrace and make use of crowd-sourcing rather than hoping that it will not disrupt their business. Described below are ways a company can exploit crowd-sourcing.
Crowd-source within your own organization
If you are a medium to large organization in a relatively specialized field, this option can work great for you. You can pool together your employees to generate ideas and reward them. For example, my company Bally Technologies caters to the specialized market of casino games and systems. Bally has about 2000 engineers world-wide. Our company posts an innovation challenge on its intranet portal and asks employees to contribute. Employees can comment on other's ideas or post their own. The top 3 ideas get a cash award.
Crowd-source to a trusted and small user group
The Amazon Vine program is an excellent example where a group of customers who have posted helpful reviews are given discounted products in exchange for their expert reviews. Another example is Communispace a company which brings together expert user group of 200-300 people to provide great feedback on a product or service. For example, Communispace brought together executives from British Airways and a group of frequent business travellers to launch 'Beds in Business' which improved revenues significantly. Kelley Connect Week and Agile consulting projects are also a great example of crowd-sourcing. The businesses benefit from ideas and students learn from the business.
Crowd-source to the world
This model works best for idea generation that thrives on contributions from a large group of people. Threadless.com listed in the the article 'The Dawn of Human Networks' is a great example. iStockPhoto is another example.
Crowdsourcing is very interesting. I liked your discussion of it on your blog. What do you think the future impacts of crowdsourcing on businesses will be?
ReplyDeleteI think there is some value for businesses. As a manager, I think it offers a great opportunity for me. I don't have authority right now to hire more people, but I can definitely spend some money to get work done through crowd-sourcing. It is like out-sourcing or contracting. But the problem is the reliability factor. You won't want to crowd-source an important client deliverable. Only small tasks.
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