Crowdsourcing? Become an expert and you’ll be crowd-surfing at the office
What was that saying we learned growing up? Ahh that’s right, work smarter not harder. As human beings, life can oftentimes be tough enough on us, so if there are ways to make it easy, why not right. This applies to companies and businesses as well. If they can have their consumers interact with them without having to go out of their way or at the expense of their company.
Crowdsourcing is a business method used by companies to raise capital for specific special projects. Simply said by Braineet, “crowdsourcing involves seeking knowledge, goods, or services from a large body of people. It’s a way of looking beyond a business or organization’s internal capacity for ideation, and turning the question over to a wider group of thinkers.” As we dive into crowdsourcing, we see it take a few different forms.
open innovation: Open innovation is a distributed, participatory approach to innovation recognizing that useful knowledge exists in a number of different places, including both within and outside a business.
Co-creation: Co-creation involves businesses or organizations working alongside private or public individuals (usually customers or hard-core fans) to develop ideas for new products, services, and systems.
Ideas portals: A form of open innovation, ideas portals are places for fans and customers (and sometimes employees) to submit their suggestions for products and services, and for solutions to tough problems — Braineet
A very popular company, especially heavy on the west coast, who uses crowdsourcing to their advantage is Waze. Waze is a GPS navigation app powered and owned by Google. It has become extremely popular due to its user friendly accessibility. The app allows you to choose and find the quickest route to your destination, generally getting you where you would like to go quicker than Google maps. Here’s where this app becomes elite. You can choose which day and time you want to leave, as it will let you know the difference between each one. For example, I would like to travel tomorrow at 5pm. If I were to check the time now, it would be different than it might be at that time. It tells me when to leave, traffic, objects in the road, police sightings, and if I needed to make a stop at lets say a Starbucks on the way, it would even calculate that into my already in route drive.
How does this translate to crowdsourcing? This is an interactive navigation app. It encourages its users to alert other drivers of different things like accidents, police, objects, traffic or even potholes.
As Investopedia says, “traffic apps encourage drivers to report accidents and other roadway incidents to provide real-time updated information to app users.”
Another business example of crowdsourcing is Uber. Uber has used crowdsourcing as a tactic and been successful. Uber pairs available drivers with consumers who are in need of transportation or a “ride”. By using this crowdsourcing tactic, they are able to see how their Uber drivers perform, based on the ratings they receive from their rides. Another quote from Investopedia says, “While crowdsourcing often involves breaking up a big job, businesses sometimes use crowdsourcing to assess how multiple people perform at the same job.”
Crowdsourcing has changed the way businesses obtain information from their consumers. As Crowdsourcingweek has mentioned, “Crowdsourcing touches across all social and business interactions. It is changing the way we work, hire, research, make and market. Governments are applying crowdsourcing to empower citizens and give a greater voice to the people. In science and health care, crowdsourcing can democratize problem solving and accelerate innovation. With education, it has the potential to revolutionize the system, just as crowdfunding is currently challenging traditional banking and investing processes.”
Companies like Lays, turning to the public to help them with their problems. They want to know what kind new flavors they could be producing that their customers actually want. Work smarter, not harder.
