Crowd-huh?

Sogra Nishath / Design Research / User Research

Ever heard of a crowd that can actually be of any use? Ever heard of the term “Crowdsourcing”? If you haven’t, then read on…

Recently, I attended a panel discussion about “Crowdsourcing” hosted by the PDMA Carolinas (Product Development and Management Association). So, what is Crowdsourcing? It is an idea generating technique where you can use your employees or users to generate new ideas or share possible solutions to existing issues. Before the event, I was curious to see what Crowdsourcing was, and I quickly learned that I had been a crowd member myself for one such event. On a Sunday afternoon a few months ago I was on Facebook, just browsing to see what my friends were up to. I noticed a call for design submissions from Kroger for designing a reusable bag, and the prize was $1,000. I clicked on the link, and before I knew it I was absorbed in creating my reusable bag on Kroger’s website using their predefined templates, borders, stickies, images etc. I cannot believe it was so much fun! I got to see all the other submissions, and I could even post mine for my friends/family to vote. I thought that it was a great way for Kroger to get new designs.

This type of mass idea generation is a large task to maintain and moderate, but the panelists shared how and when it has worked for their company. The panel was moderated by Jeffery Phillips of OVO, an innovation consulting firm.

Vida Killian of Dell spoke of IdeaStorm, a website where members of the Dell community share ideas for the company. Once an idea has been submitted, other visitors can promote or demote the post to indicate their support (or not) of the idea. Since 2007, the site has generated 11,500 ideas, and 650,000 votes to promote/demote an idea, and it has received 85,000 comments on the ideas. Dell has implemented 317 of the ideas generated by the site.

Richard Nesbitt of IBM discussed Jams, a website that IBM uses to collect new ideas and solutions from their employees worldwide and from their customers, with the goal of accelerating decision making and action. As a result of Jams, 10 new IBM businesses were launched with seed investment totaling $100 million.

Melissa Blaisdell, a Social Media Strategist with Cisco, spoke of how they interact with their customers and employees through Online interactive network, podcasts, blogs (facebook, twitter, Cisco forums), and closed-loop processes to share insights to product teams.

Dr. Barry Bayfus from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill had several key points to share on Crowdsourcing techniques. He provided statistical information about people’s internet habits that suggests that it may be difficult to harness Crowdsourcing. For example, only 1% of visitors to blogs and forums continue to stick around and read or participate. He mentioned Lotka’s Law, in which a distribution of contributions is highly skewed and as the number of ideas posted increases, people producing many ideas become less frequent.

What are the best aspects of Crowdsourcing?

• Cost saving technique to gather thousands of ideas
• Fast results
• Visitors build on each others’ ideas, having a conversation about potential problems or ways to make the idea even better

What are potential problems with Crowdsourcing?

• Ideas may not be from the target audience
• Too many ideas to sift through
• Need to monitor the posts for negative publicity
• Ideas may win due to popularity but might not be the best ones to implement
• Depending on the type of results needed, could be time consuming

So, there you go, a new term for something you may have already been participating in. It was nice to see large companies using these innovative ways to gather new ideas.

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