“Crowds don’t innovate–individuals do.” writes Dan Woods. Obviously, I think that Dan missed the point a bit as to what crowdsourcing really is!
Let’s look at the basics again:
“A crowd is a group of people. The crowd may have a common purpose or set of emotions, such as at a political rally, at a sports event, or during looting, or simply be made up of many people going about their business in a busy area (eg shopping).”
Crowds are groups of individuals with different backgrounds, preferences, opinions, skills, etc. What makes a crowd is when just one of these preferences coincide with preferences of others.
“Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call.” “Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions.”
The key is “sourcing” in crowdsourcing, it refers to the concept of getting groups of people access to potentially solve a problem. It is not that the “crowd” can solve anything; it is that an individual that is already influenced by being part of a movement or community now has access to a platform where the most appropriate solution will be accepted.
In the era of market segmentation we focused on segmenting markets based on behavior, gender, preferences, etc and then tried to solve problems for the segment in a generic way. Concepts like mass customization pushed concept of allowing a “market” to change some of the variances in the product/service based on individual preferences. Customerization is when the marketing messages and produced product or service are customized simultaneously based on individual preferences.
So, my take on crowdsourcing is; it is a platform for customerization where both the supply-side and demand-side of the value network in the economic setting participate in the extraction of value. Value in this case refers to economic and other forms of value for example reputation building, education, societal causes.
There is a relationship between crowds and tribes. Tribes is defined as “the term to refer to societies organized largely on the basis of kinship”. Crowds are formed based on common properties, and in most cases when crowds are formed inside companies it happens due to kinship; hence the relationship with tribes.
Let’s look at an example:
If you want to crowdsource ideas to develop a new business idea, you would need to firstly have access to a crowd. This crowd could be your immediate social network, or some other community where the individuals in the crowd have similar interests (and possibly only one common interest). You would need to present a “request for ideas” to the crowd where individuals will then decide (individually) if it is worth their while to participate. If the incentive is for immediate gain; where you pay money for great ideas, or if the incentive is long term; where you pay once the idea has been implemented will be different between various parties. As the crowdsourced ideas get submitted, the crowd will assist in determining if these ideas can contribute to the problem that’s being solved. This rating and ranking approach is now well adopted by eBay, Digg, etc where crowds express their views by voting en mass.
The ability to communicate and integrate ideas in society will continue to fascinate the human race. My take is that crowdsourcing related activity is an evolutionary phenomena on the way to have a more efficiently integrated human-technology decision making landscape. We are influenced by our peers, networks, friends, etc which are all crowds and we use technology to remove the inefficiencies of this influence.