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  Written by Tom Powell: MBA student at Duke; Abnormal interest in innovative applications of technology, design, outside innovation, crowdsourcing, and social computing. tom@coinnovative.com
  
  
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I meant to write about this a while ago, but am just getting to it. Sami Viitamaki has an interesting, exhaustive overview of what one needs to consider when implementing crowdsourcing.

He looks in detail at five areas:

• Focus
• Language
• Incentives
• Rules
• Tools

In addition he makes the important distinction between the various levels of participation to whom the service needs to be tailored:

• Creators,
• Critics
• Connectors
• Crowds
• Non-participating consumers

Successful efforts follow these guidelines and you’ll see the ones that fail missing on one or many of these dimensions. Lacking transparency. Ignoring incentives (both extrinsic and intrinsic). Being exploitative. Taking as a given that your customers will care.

There is so much opportunity here, but we are sure to see many failures as companies ignore these considerations and fail miserably. Should be fun to watch.

According to Patricia Seybold in these two great posts from a while back, Biz 3.0.  While I don’t think we need another buzz-phrase, she does a great job of summarizing why this is all so important and lasting. Business is in the midst of being transformed by the evolution of the Internet in ways that are much deeper than have been realized thus far. By opening up businesses and bringing in customers whenever feasible, doing business takes on a whole new form, one in which leaders of the business are orchestrators of innovation and serving the customer in the best way possible using input from every available channel both internal and external.

“Customers lead us beyond a customer-empowered Web strategy to a customer outcome-driven business strategy.”

With Web 2.0, customers are talking to each other. With Enterprise 2.0 customers are talking to businesses in much more dynamic, deep, and interesting ways than ever thought possible. The line between employee and customer has become blurred in some cases and interests are aligned. Biz 3.0, as Patricia defines it, will bring those two pieces even closer together. The customer is no longer at odds with the firm but an integral part of the entire process.

Well, I think it’s exciting….

Although I’ve highlighted a good number of these already, Openeur has a great list of on-going crowdsourcing and open innovation projects. Shows the range of cool stuff happening and points to the possibility for much more to come.

Pepsi conducted a contest recently called Design Our Pepsi Can. Users submitted 100,000 designs and through online voting decided on their favorite design. The designer won $10K and gets the warm and fuzzy’s associated with having his design printed on a line of cans.

Had Pepsi gone the traditional route the design would have cost an order of magnitude more than what it cost them (not including the promotional expense for the site itself.) They not only get a design on the cheap, prevalidated as a popular design, but they save a hell of a lot of money. And who knows, maybe the winner doesn’t normally make a living through design/art work. Or maybe they just gave away their professional services for cheap.

I won’t argue for or against the merits of this type of crowdsourcing, but I will say that it can, has, and will work — given the right conditions, product, etc. Of course crowdsourcing such as this cannot be applied to everything, Pepsi will continue to design cans the old fashioned way, but they have obviously benefited from conducting the contest. Not to mention that the folks who submitted the 100K designs spent at least a bit of time thinking about Pepsi and designing a cool can. It’s the Threadless model of can design.

It seems people tend to jump on a trend and assume it will take over the world (see offshore outsourcing, feared massive unemployment as a result of). Not the case. Crowdsourcing can’t be ignored. It also can’t be used exclusively or parasitically. Any company that attempts to suckle at the teat of free or drastically cheap labor through crowdsourcing exclusively will ultimately fail.

This is only marginally related, but it’s interesting, nonetheless: Mock Up My Tattoo. You choose a tattoo design or upload one of your own, upload a picture of yourself, and then they place the tattoo on your picture so you can see what it would look like.

MyDesignIn allows you to create an interactive floor plan and drag and drop bookmarked products into the design, but THEN you can collaborate with others online

ThinkCycle is non-profit focused on fostering open collaborative design. They have a shared online space for designers, engineers, experts, etc. to discuss, exchange and construct ideas towards the design of solutions for underserved communities and the environment.

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