When and How to Crowd-Source

Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner

By Karim R. Lakhani (Harvard Business Review, April 2013) [Link]

Key Points

• Many are using the crowd as an innovation partner, from Apple to biologists.
• Some managers remain cautious to trust in strangers to contribute.
• The main reason why some managers miss an opportunity in using the crowd is because managers don’t reconcile what the crowd is best at doing and how it can be utilised in their businesses.
• Using the crowd has a number of incentives; it’s decentralised, diverse, can solve problems efficiently, scale.
• Crowds also are intrinsically motivated and not just compelled to contribute due to salary. They are willing to learn, motivated to be better contributors and to build reputations amongst a large community of peers.
• Crowdsourcing for innovative solution is not new, bringing together communities of innovators has existed for centuries. Difference is now we have technology to help that process.
• When & How to crowdsource: Contests have been successful, by identifying a certain problem and offering incentives has driven people to act with meaningful contributions. Often they are best if you have a complex problem that needs to be solved.
• Communities: In 1998 IBM shocked the world by allying itself with open-source Apache and giving up its own in-house development team.

“Like contests, collaborative communities have a long and rich history. They were critical to the development of Bessemer steel, blast furnaces, Cornish pumping engines, and large-scale silk production.”

• Strength of community is in its diversity. It can bring together people from around the globe, from varying backgrounds and with different skills. Wikipedia continues to be a fine example of a huge collaborative project.
• Communities are good at simple tasks.

“Wikipedia shows that collaborative communities are most effective when they tackle projects whose orchestration is relatively simple. Crowd collaboration relies on extensive task modularization, standardized routines, and technology to facilitate coordination. Norms, knowledge sharing, teams, and leadership emerge to deal with what little decision making and coordination are required, but these structures are much looser than the ones found in most companies.”

• Setting up crowd communities initiatives can require only relatively modest levels of organisation. If the system is simple for people to contribute then community can build up quickly and effectively.

“But collaborative communities work best when participants can accumulate and recombine ideas, sharing information freely.”

• Crowd Complementors: They improve existing ideas and projects. In the right context the crowd can improve a product however sometimes they are not the best choice.

“The technology that has turbocharged crowdsourcing’s potency and application is still relatively new, so it is too early to fully understand the depth and reach of crowds across the economy. Nonetheless, recent experience and mounting research suggest that we may just now be seeing the outlines of a genuine expansion in capabilities—one with important implications for solving the most enigmatic problems, which might go unsolved if kept inside companies, and for taking care of a number of more-categorizable tasks.”

Review: From 2013 so a little dated, relatively concise, no data to back up findings just example cases.

How it relates to Be Seated: Crowd Communities are low-cost with a lot of advantages. When tasked with simple tasks communities are better than creating crowd contests. In theory if Be Seated wanted to amass a number of reviews very quickly it could run a short contest first in order to encourage users to generate as many posts as possible and then moving to a crowd community once a stable database of reviews was established.