Dec

19

Part 6: Expert sourcing for problem solving and innovation

Filed Under Crowdsourcing, Outside Innovation, Wisdom of Crowds | Leave a Comment

My former employer Forrester and my former co-worker Chris Townsend recently wrote a report called Tapping The Wisdom of Experts. This is an extension or subset of the concept of Innovation Networks which Navi Radjou has been writing about for years at Forrester and can be seen as a subset as well, in a certain sense, of crowdsourcing. It is also a good summary of the topic covered in Part 6 of this series.

(To be sure we’re on the same page:
Innovation networks = “Firms seamlessly weave internally and externally available invention and innovation services to optimize the profitability of their products, services, and business models.”
Crowdsourcing = sourcing small and large jobs from anyone and everyone.
Expert sourcing = sourcing from specialized, professional-grade, vetted experts.
Wisdom of crowds = the wisdom of the crowd’s collective intelligence outweighs any individuals.)

expertise-innovation.jpg

Expert sourcing involves several actors that fall into the mold of innovation networks:
Inventor: the experts (enterprise R&D, academics, government labs, retired technicians, you know, experts.)
Transformers and Financiers: corporations who buy, develop, and fund the innovations
Broker: expert sourcing providers who bring together the experts and corporations.

Innovation networks and expert sourcing further erode the purpose and importance of the large corporation and a massive, closed R&D facility. With the aggregation, moderation and policing of transactions, NineSigma and Innocentive facilitate this possibility. Along with online collaboration improvements, the need to have a large building or organization under which a multitude of people need to sit are further eroded. Smaller, more focused enterprises are made possible as transaction and search costs between inventor and transformers/financiers decrease (lower transaction costs, after all, are the reason companies formed in the first place).

While it appears this market is pretty small in the grand scheme of things, companies large and small will not be able to afford to only look for internally for innovations, they must search the horizon, getting input and help from customers, suppliers, and experts around the world. Tool providers are and will continue to emerge on all fronts, but if firms do not weave these tools and innovation sources into their processes, they will eventually be left behind. The key, of course, is not to hand over the reigns to outside innovators or customer whims but to incorporate the knowledge gained into your own expertise and discretion to mold it into real, profitable innovation.

Companies in the space:
Innocentive (Problems issued to recruited scientists)
NineSigma (Sends out RFPs to network of universities, inventors, businesses)
YourEncore (Posts projects to retired technical people)
yet2 (Matching and providing services/resources to IP buyers/sellers)

Further reading:
HBR: Getting Unusual Suspects to Solve R&D Puzzles
If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone
Nine Sigma - Expert Response to Innocentive Post
Open Innovation Becoming Key to R&D Success

Nov

3

User-led innovation report, the Australians get it.

Filed Under Crowdsourcing, Outside Innovation, Wisdom of Crowds | Leave a Comment

I finally got around to reading a great report out of Swinburne University of Technology written by Darren Sharp & Mandy Salomon called “User-led Innovation: A New Framework for Co-creating Business and Social Value“. It does a great job of tying together many of the themes discussed on co>innovative. A variety of innovations over the last couple of decades have been improving in parallel as well as building off of each other to create this… this thing that is going on, whatever you want to call it:

Open source software, citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, user-generated content, social networks, the sharing economy, peer production, Multi-User Virtual Environments, participatory media, collaborative creativity. Distributed capitalism. These are all terms in the rapidly expanding lexicon of the field of ‘user-led innovation’. For much of the 20th century business operated on an enterprise logic of ‘managerial capitalism’ which maintains that value is created by organisational producers and is stored inside the products and services they sell.

Quoting Eric von Hippel:

Historically the assumption has been that manufacturers are the innovators, they go and they look at users, understand what they need and then develop something in response. We then went and looked at the histories of innovation and found out that very often, very commercially successful products actually had been developed by users at the leading edge of a market-based trend first. So it appeared that in fact innovation was user-led, which means that the users actually develop prototype products and show their value and use of what they really want.

These lead users (who can be viewed as pre-early adopters, creating their own solutions) have entered into an increasingly ideal epoch in which more and more tools are available every day to innovate: tools of media production and distribution, rapid fabrication tools such as widely available laser cutters and 3D printers, communication with other enthusiasts, etc. This distributed capitalism is the result of the democratization of innovation that Eric Von Hippel wrote about in the aptly titled Democratizing Innovation

. The Support Economy

Below is a great classification of four successful and productive user-led niches:

  • Social Currency Niche — Myspace, Flickr, YouTube: people create content and gain attention and connect with others.
  • Collaborative Niche — Wikipedia, open source software: people come together and perform part of a larger task to reach a common goal.
  • Extractive niche — sort of the unpleasant side of all this in which companies try to exploit free revealing from the crowd, attempting to get something for nothing or next to nothing while ignoring the desires of the crowd.
  • Hybrid niche — combines elements of the above.

    • User Led Services Ecology

    If you ever find yourself scratching your head about exactly what I am talking about, I would highly recommend reading the report.
    (Also wanted to say Hi to Paul.)

    Oct

    20

    Can’t we come up with anything better than crowdsourcing?

    Filed Under Crowdsourcing, Wisdom of Crowds | Leave a Comment

    I dislike the terms crowdsourcing and wisdom of crowds. First of all because the terms, particularly the former, have become the worst of buzzwords, meaning many things to many people and applied in far too many places. Apparently everything online now has some relation to Web 2.0, crowdsourcing, or user generated content. Depending on your definition you can call both YouTube (crowd submitted videos) and Innocentive (open calls for corporate problem solving jobs) crowdsourcing. Now, the original, official definition put forth by Jeff Howe (who coined the term) is “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.”

    This is not to denigrate any of these areas, it is simply to say that they have been applied to so many areas since then as to make them essentially meaningless. Of course, Web 2.0 itself never had a narrow, well-defined meaning — O’Reilly’s initial description of it was a slide with about 25 bubbles on it each with a different concept in it.

    It is not the crowds producing the wisdom but the individuals in the crowd whose collective wisdom creates value. Dave Winer agrees saying “I am not part of a crowd, I am an individual” There seem to be two distinct things going on: tapping into the collective individual intelligence of a group of people (prediction markets, Threadless picks, popularity, ratings) and tapping into individual contributors or empowering individual contributors to participate in something that would classically be taken care of within the firm, via a contract with another firm, or via a professional relationship (what Jeff Howe would consider true crowdsourcing).

    So, unless you are tapping into a crowd and, in the end, paying someone in that crowd to produce work that you would classically outsource or hire externally for, you are not crowdsourcing. You are likely creating a community, tapping into the wisdom of crowds, getting feedback, and on and on. The very fact that there are so many different things going on, is why I am — VERY slowly — working my way through a multi-part look at every different aspect of what is going on and how it will effect business and communication.


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