Crowdsourcing Goes Mainstream

The trend for crowdsourcing continues to gather momentum, with the news that Canadian
band Barenaked Ladies are planning to release their new album with all
29 songs available as ProTools files, meaning fans will be free to
remix them or mash them up however they like.

As discussed previously on PSFK, the term crowdsourcing was coined by Jeff Howe in a June article
for Wired magazine. It has quickly
became a buzzword du jour - two weeks later, the term was throwing up
over 500,000 hits on Google. A BusinessWeek feature on it a couple of weeks ago confirmed crowdsourcing is now becoming an accepted mainstream business practice.

As Jeff put it himself, ‘Crowdsourcing represents the act of a
company or institution taking a function once performed by employees
and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of
people in the form of an open call’. The concept has been around in the
open source software industry for years and has swept through the stock
photography business in the form of iStockphoto.

Crowdsourcing has also popped up in the marketing industry. The innovative US cable channel Current TV
invited viewers to create homemade adverts for Sony, with the winner
selected by the consumer electronics brand to be used in a real
campaign. Other crowdsourcers mentioned in the blogosphere include
software companies Rent A Coder Mechanical Turk and Cambrian House, shoe maker John Fluevog, T-Shirt company Threadless  and trends website Trendwatching.

Perhaps most significantly for the business world, Crowdsourcing is
now penetrating global research and development. Its highest profile
manifestation there is InnoCentive
the website launched by pharmaceuticals giant Eli Lilly and used by the
likes of Proctor & Gamble and Dupont to put highly technical
scientific challenges out to a community of scientists, who attempt to
solve them in return for a fee. Kraft, the world’s number one food
company, has also entered the space with the launch of its Open Innovation
programme, which invites consumers to submit new product ideas through
its website. This initiative has already brought two products to
market: weight management programme The South Beach Diet and coffee system Tassimo.

With the rise of citizen media
and the rapidly growing popularity of user-generated content,
crowdsourcing has come at the right time. It’s no surprise that its
arrival has been flanked by two other concepts that have been around
for a while, but are only just becoming accepted by the marketing and
design industries: ethnography and user-centred design.
Between them, these two concepts have the potential to revolutionise
the way companies think about consumers, by putting them at the heart
of their research and development activities. Crowdsourcing could prove
to be the third piece of the puzzle. Naturally, it has both upsides and
downsides.

On the upside, involving consumers in the innovation process is
unarguably a good thing. It makes them feel like stakeholders, promotes
brand loyalty and brings a fresh perspective to companies that may
otherwise be too focused on their inner workings and what they are
capable of making, rather than what their customers actually want.
Crowdsourcing opens up industries to amateurs, hobbyists and
enthusiasts, giving them an opportunity to profit from their talents
and build experience without needing to grease their way up the
corporate pole.

On the downside, as has been the case with user-centred design and
ethnography, crowdsourcing will no doubt be hijacked by less reputable
companies seeking to jump on the bandwagon and ride the wave of its
popularity for quick profits. Another problem is people submitting
ideas and solutions are frequently paid next to nothing for their
efforts, meaning crowdsourcing could become simply a byword for cheap,
exploitative labour. Furthermore, the current crop of crowdsourcers are
tending to look outside for solutions to engineering and chemistry
problems, rather than ’softer’ creative ones, and are looking for full
products rather than concepts. In doing so, they are closing themselves
off to where the real juice could be found.

Lastly, while they are building large bodies of top minds to draw
on, what these R&D crowdsourcers are failing to do is bring them
together as a community. If a company could come along and put together
a global community of creative thinkers and doers available to engage
on client projects, now then we’d be talking!

Contributed by Alex Pollock