27 Jun , 2020   

What is Crowdsourcing?

As the name implies, Crowdsourcing means ‘outsourcing to the crowds’ to craft better products and services, achieve the best solutions and product design, and resolve long pending unresolved problems. Crowdsourcing takes the particular activities of a company or institution, otherwise performed by their employees/external consultant; these tasks outsource to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. It leverages their wealth of knowledge and ideas to achieve business objectives, plus many other immense opportunities. Innovation crowdsourcing is very much useful in all businesses as it gives great benefits by using the crowd's skills and expertise that the crowds generate ideas and co-creating solutions within an end-to-end innovation process with the lowest cost compared to the in-house way of creating solutions. Sometimes, in-house or external consultants may not achieve the goal as they may not have that many capabilities/knowledge. Crowdsourcing projects can target both internal and external participants via questionnaires, competitions, promotions, and other methods. Because of this, crowdsourced input can serve as a major component of open and internal innovation.  

Some of the major historical data related to Crowdsourcing:

• Solving the Toughest Innovation Problem More than 300 Years Ago through “Crowds”
• The Duomo – Florence 1418 – up to 2,000 Florins
• The Longitude Prize 1714 – up to £20,000
• The invention of Food Canning 1800 – up to 12,000 Francs
• NASA Uses Crowdsourcing for Open Innovation Contracts
• PepsiCo launched ad contest in 2006 against the advice of ad agencies and internal dissent

The best results from Crowdsourcing can be achieved only if it is planned well, including:

• Select the right challenges for crowdsourcing with clear objectives and goals
• Provide the right channel to showcase and brainstorm ideas, challenges 
• Select and reach the right crowd having potential expertness 
• Offer an attractive reward, offers, and motivation
• Provide participants some feedback on their entries/submissions which may help them to improve their capabilities.