Crowd Sourcing
October 16, 2008 8:24 am RandomCrowd Sourcing is basically getting your consumers to develop your products. It’s not a new idea companies have been asking for feedback and suggestions , well forever, but now with the tools avalialable on the Internet, from simple ask a question type http://moderator.appspot.com/ to Biotech research, the ease and speed at which it’s possible means a lot more people are giving it a go.
Crowd sourcing is basically tapping into the fact that people love to create, innovate, compete and collaborate it’s human nature, what has allowed us to build the civilization we have now. But basically ‘Capitalism’ and by that I mean the greedy self centred cause of the credit crunch type Capitalism meant that people patented and copyrighted anything they could so that only they could profit.
The new model is to open these patents and copyrights up, and let people have a poke around. The users of your products and services are the ones who most know how to improve it, it gives you access to a ‘free’ research team of unlimited size who are all looking for improvements and hacks and other uses because they want to!
There are obviously pitfalls which are basically average and extreme.
You get so many ideas that when you try and implement them they cancel each other out to form the grey goo of averageness, or you may (not realise that) all the ideas have come from the extreme minority who have decided to engage with you, building a product which appeals only to the geek.
So your ‘free’ outsourcing will still need those internal checks and balances.
http://studiowikitecture.wordpress.com/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93495217
http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/
The other thing to do is to search for your product, see what people have done, I mean if you’ve seen the hacks and toolkits available for the Wiimot, that people have made in their own time for fun, it’s truely awesome.
Give people access to the tools and the knowledge and they will build and innovate in ways you never expected. It’s like giving a kid (or me!) a massive box of Lego.