Innovation Through “Crowdsourcing”

Bob Moll, Friday, July 21, 2006 @ 7:15 am

Companies are leveraging a new technique called “crowdsourcing”  to bring customers into the design process. A recent Businessweek article describes crowdsourcing as “the unofficial (but catchy) name of an IT-enabled business trend in which companies get unpaid or low-paid amateurs to design products, create content, even tackle corporate R&D problems in their spare time.”

The article goes on to describe different flavors of crowdsourcing. For example, a T-shirt company called Threadless relies on the results of a contest to define its new products. Here the customer is the designer. Another example is a furniture company called Muji (Muji.net). Muji relies on its consumer network for generating and ranking ideas, but then turns the highly ranked ideas to professional designers for creation of new products.

While crowdsourcing may work well for consumer products, can it work for more complex products? The article asks this question and the answer is perhaps not a simple one. The more complex something is, the smaller the “crowd” will be that has the interest and knowledge to give input. Nonetheless, the ability to easily network people together provides a reason to believe bringing customers into the innovation process will happen more and more as companies look to create a competitive edge through innovation.

user experience design

Comments: 2 so far

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1. 

   Certainly Wikipedia and Linux are examples of more complex products that rely on peer production. Chris Anderson, in his writings about “The Long Tail” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail) talks about the phenomenon of peer creation in some depth, and about what that means for more niche products with smaller “crowds.”

   Comment by Bernhard Kappe, Friday, July 21, 2006 @ 1:11 pm

2. 

   Hello,

   in the same concept, look at this website that I’ve just noticed http://cecrowdsourcing.blogspot.com/ This is a further step on the crowdsourcing as it aims to design and sale electronic products for the first time (it’s hardware development and not software for this time). The company’s name is Logoden. It looks promising but it’s just started. I’d recommand you to join this community, who knows it can work and you can potentially earn money.

   Comment by Ventus, Monday, August 28, 2006 @ 2:48 pm

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