Crowdsourcing
is outsourcing a particular task to a virtual crowd. Nowadays we identify three
main crowdsourcing campaigns: Problem solving network, collective creation and
crowd voting. This solution is more and more commonly used as actual market
become competitive and companies have to distinguish themselves through
innovation in order to gain competitive advantage. Crowdsourcing provide
additional advantage; indeed, this helps companies cutting their cost,
increasing their speed in production and the most important is that it creates a
huge buzz effect around the company name.
We have in mind several examples of
effective crowdsourcing campaigns as NETFLIX’s one who get more than 44 000
subscriptions to find improvements on their recommendation algorithm or the
campaign driven by Doritos named “crash your Super bowl”. On the contrary, we
have other examples of campaigns which failed in the past as what happened with
the Germany’s pirate party who only had 22 subscriptions. Therefore, it would
be interesting to see in a first part which are the steps to respect in order to
launch an effective crowdsourcing campaign and then in a second part, have
support this article taken from the Harvard business review to identify what
are the 4 main challenges that we can face today when launching such a platform.
First of all, you have to decide effectively
which type of information we are looking for and choose the appropriate type of
crowdsourcing campaign (Problem solving / collective creation or crowd voting).
Then it is really important to decide which crowd you want to target; do you
want to be 100% sure to get as much precise information as possible and
therefore target only an expert crowd or are you open minded and ready to
receive ideas from a general crowd? In addition, the type of incentive you
decide to use to engage people in your campaign is a crucial step: do you
prefer to offer intrinsic reward as recognition or extrinsic as financial rewards
(Netflix offered one million dollars to the winning team)? Before launching
your campaign, you also have to key evaluation criteria that are going to be
managed internally, follow them and be ready to play as the dictator. Finally,
the last two steps to respects gave to be taken into account once your campaign
is launched. Indeed, you will have to pay both a proactive and reactive
attention to your potential users. Proactive meaning that instead of waiting
for people to publish ideas on your topic, you should start publishing before
them. This shows that you are engaged in this campaign and this is also an
opportunity for you to show which type of ideas you are waiting for. You will
also have to be reactive, meaning that you have to show that what the
participants wrote cares to you. The best way to do this is to publish a
comment on every idea offered. This is really positive, because it increases
motivation and it also enable you to show which ideas are valuable for the
following users.
By following the article taken from the
Harvard business review, we learn that nowadays, crowdsourcing campaigns are
facing 4 main challenges nowadays.
The first one is that even we have some examples
of really effective campaigns, the overall percentage of heavy contributors is
not so high. Therefore, companies have to find some ways to attract more and
more users in order to increase the amount of new creative concepts coming from
that type campaigns.
The second challenge is based on which
platform structure you decide to build your campaign on. Some brands decide to
build their campaign on competition using platforms as Kaggle but other brands
try to find an equilibrium between cooperation and competition promoting a new
wave of work organization called coopetition driven by the platform Openideo. This
new format shows better results, indeed 62% of the ideas coming from
coopetition platforms are judged as exploitable versus 50% for the
competitions.
In my opinion, the most important challenges
companies are going to face is the idea evaluation and the legal definition of
the relationship between companies and users . Indeed, ideas evaluation are
currently based on participants, however this method is not the most accurate.
In fact, different users can have different ideas, particularly different the
company’s ideas, and therefore grades are not homogeneous and really relevant.
This stake here is to improve this grading system.
Finally, the last challenge is to legally
articulate the relation between the user and the company in terms of working
hours or intellectual property. The ideas for the future is to recognize users as
employees of the company and to establish contract between both parties and why
not with a salary?
To conclude, I would say that companies really
have to keep using crowdsourcing as driver of innovation, however, I agree with
the author on the fact that some points have to be improved if this type of
campaigns wants to persist in the future. As I wrote before, the most important
stakes are the evaluation of the ideas and the legal definition of the
relationship between companies and users.
Julien Fraysse & Arthur Phillipon.
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