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CROWDSOURCING


Crowdsourcing is the process of getting work, ideas or funding, usually online, from a crowd of people. The word is a combination of the words 'crowd' and 'outsourcing'.[1] For the first time the term with such meaning was used in 2006 by Jeff Howe, contributing editor at Wired magazine.[2] However, before Howe came up with this idea the etymologists of the Phrasedick Brigade used the word crowdsourcing for three decades referring to a form of the financial systematic risk.[3]

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History of Crowdsourcing

During the period when James Surowiecki wrote his book "The Wisdom of Crowds," innovating dot coms started making a name for themselves with the process not yet termed crowdsourcing. The crowdsourced T-shirt online retailer Threadless launched. Wikipedia crowdsourced knowledge, and YouTube crowdsourced video entertainment. Freelancer.com was born. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk microtask platform launched and put into place a system that would continue to grow, evolve and revolutionize the way work gets done, from categorizing to outsourcing content marketing.[4]

The Rise of Crowdsourcing

In 2006, Wired’s editor Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing with his “Rise of Crowdsourcing” article.[5] In his article, Howe describes four trending crowdsourcing platforms existing at that time: iStockphoto, iFilm, InnoCentive and Mechanical Turk. iStockphoto and InnoCentive are labor markets for specialized talents. iStockphoto supplied firms with desired preexisting photographs for $1 each, while InnoCentive helped Research&Design departments iFilm was a popular repository of video clips purchased by Viacom in order to license huge amount of videos fast and for much cheaper. The last mentioned platform was web-based marketplace Mechanical Turk created by Amazon. It helped companies find people to perform tasks computers are generally lousy at - identifying items in a photograph, skimming real estate documents to find identifying information, writing short product descriptions, transcribing podcasts.[6]

Combined with the rapid growth of e-commerce, the age of the consumer, mobile technologies and social media in the last seven years, crowdsourcing has revolutionized just about any industry smart enough to utilize it. The world’s best global brands have increasingly used crowdsourcing to get things done, and as this interactive timeline shows, the year-over-year growth speaks for itself.[7]

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Types of Crowdsourcing

Crowdsource Design

If you’re looking for a logo design, you can tell a crowd of designers what you want, how much you will pay, and your deadline. All interested designers will create a finished design specifically for you. You’ll receive 50-300+ different finished logo designs, and you can keep whichever design you like the best. By doing design this way, crowdsourcing actually increases the quality & decreases the price, compared to online freelancing.

Crowdsourcing can also be used to get designs for furniture, fashion, advertisements, video, & product design. Just about anything that can be designed can be crowdsourced.

Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding involves asking a crowd of people to donate money to your project. For example, if you want to raise $10,000 to pay for studio time to record a new CD, crowdfunding can help you raise that money.. You find a crowdfunding platform, set the goal amount, deadline, and any rewards offered to donors. You must raise 100% of your goal before the deadline, or all the donations are returned to the donors. Deadlines are typically less than 60 days.

Crowdfunding is mostly used by artists, charities, & start-ups to raise money for projects such as filming a documentary, manufacturing an iPod watch, cancer research, or seed money. Read more about crowdfunding or browse crowdfunding sites.

Microtasks

Microtasking involves breaking work up into tiny tasks and sending the work to a crowd of people. If you have 1,000 photos on your website that need captions, you can ask 1,000 individual people to each add a caption to one photo. Break up the work and decide the payment for each completed task (typically .01¢ – .10¢ per task).[8] Some individual microtasks can take just a few seconds and pay a few cents per task. More complex writing or transcription tasks might pay $10 or $20 per job, while some highly skilled work, such as writing programming code, commands higher rates.[9] With microtasking, you can expect to see results within minutes. Microtasking can involve tasks such as scanning images, proofreading, database correction and transcribing audio files.

Work is done faster, cheaper, and usually with less errors (when validation systems are in place). Additionally, microtasks can often be performed by people in less fortunate countries, including those with SMS capabilities but without computers. Read more about microtasks or browse microtasks sites.

Open Innovation

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If you are unsure of where to begin with an idea for a business opportunity, whether it’s product design or perhaps a marketing firm, crowdsourcing can help through open innovation. Open innovation allows people from all aspects of business such as investors, designers, inventors, and marketers to collaborate into a functional profit making reality. This can be done either through a dedicated web platform to gain outside perspective, or used with only internal employees.[10]

Crowds are becoming the partner of choice to answer the most vexing innovation and research questions. Apple has turned to large numbers of users and developers distributed around the world to propel its growth by creating apps and podcasts that enhance its products. Biologists at the University of Washington used crowds of external contributors to map the structure of an AIDS-related virus that had stumped academic and industry experts for more than 15 years.[11]

Open innovation brings together people from different parts of the world and different sectors of business to work together on a project. This is effectively a collection of different fields and levels of expertise that would not otherwise be available to any budding entrepreneur. It also elevates previously considered uninvolved parties, such as investors, to roll up their sleeves and impart their knowledge, essentially becoming more than just a cash cow.[12]

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Personal Crowdsourcing

Apart from businesses, crowdsourcing became an appealing tool to individuals. In 2008, a team of entrepreneurs developed a website GoFundMe, which helps individuals gather money for personal needs. This idea came to the founder of the company, Brad Damphousse, when he wanted to save up on a vacation, which led him to the idea that $1 from every of his friend on Facebook and other social media would allow him to make his dream come true [13]. The idea of personal crowdsourcing became very popular both among those who were in need and those, who wanted to donate.

Worksource

Worksource is a crowd of people that completes repetitive tasks or piecework projects. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a worksource initiative for tasks (such as sorting or classification) that are best served by human oversight.[14]

A recent survey of 1,046 active U.S. based Mechanical Turk workers found that about 25% of respondents said that their crowdsourcing work comprised more than 10% of their annual income, according to research conducted by CrowdControl, which manages crowdsourcing projects. More than half of these workers are women, and most are between age 26 and 35, the survey found.

However, professor at Harvard Law School, Jonathan Zittrain, is concerned that crowdsourced labor risks creating so-called "digital sweatshops," where workers who may be underage work long hours on mind-numbing tasks for very little money—or, if the work is structured as a game, for no money at all. Crowdsourcing sites often pitch their work to stay-at-home moms or students who can pick up a few tasks to do during short breaks.

Projects outsourced to the crowd can be used to help support workers with few other options. Crowdsourcing firm Samasource, a San Francisco nonprofit, specializes in assigning microtasks, such as verifying business addresses, to workers in the developing world. Samasource says it promises to pay workers a living wage.[15]

Pros & Cons

Strengths

Crowdsourcing’s biggest benefit is the ability to receive better quality results, since several people offer their best ideas, skills, & support. Crowdsourcing allows you to select the best result from a sea of ‘best entries,’ as opposed to receiving the best entry from a single provider. Results can be delivered much quicker than traditional methods, since crowdsourcing is a form of freelancing. You can get a finished video within a month, a finished design or idea within a week, and microtasks appear within minutes.[16]

Crowdsourcing can improve productivity and creativity while minimizing labor and research expenses. Using the Internet to solicit feedback from an active and passionate community of customers can reduce the amount of time spent collecting data through formal focus groups or trend research, while also seeding enthusiasm for upcoming products. By involving a cadre of customers in key marketing, branding, and product-development processes, managers can reduce both staffing costs and the risks associated with uncertain marketplace demand.[17]

Weaknesses

Crowds are not employees, so executives can't expect to control them. Indeed, while they may not ask for cash or in-kind products, participants will seek compensation in the form of satisfaction, recognition, and freedom.[18] Crowds, research shows, are energized by intrinsic motivations—such as the desire to learn—that are more likely to come into play when people decide for themselves what problems to attack. The opportunity to burnish one’s reputation among a large community of peers is another strong motivator.[19] They will also demand time, attention, patience, good listening skills, transparency, and honesty. For traditional top-down organizations, this shift in management culture may prove difficult.

Moreover, clear instructions are essential in crowdsourcing. You could potentially be searching through thousands of possible ideas, which can be painstaking, or even complicated, if the instructions are not clearly understood. Some forms of crowdsourcing do involve spec work, which some people are against. Quality can be difficult to judge if proper expectations are not clearly stated.[20]

Crowdsourcing in Marketing

Co-creation

At its core co-creation is about involving a community outside your company in the ideation phase of the new product or service development. With co-creation, the participants—which may include customers, suppliers or the general population — are made aware that they are contributing towards the development of ideas and concepts. Through a series of steps, people are invited to contribute, evaluate, and refine ideas and concepts.

Main benefits of co-creation

1. Increased innovation capacity. Because you’re tapping into the creative and intellectual skill sets of people outside your organization, you can get more ideas without hiring a whole new team.

2. Increased innovation velocity. When done right, and if you’re using the right technology, you could go from need identification to reviewing innovative ideas and concept within days—something that used to take months to do.

3. Reduced innovation risk. People in a co-creation community are typically pre-screened to make sure that they are familiar with the category. These people then vote for submitted ideas. As these people are already familiar with the product and category, you can be more confident with the ideas that the community votes for.

4. Increased flow of quality ideas & concepts into your development pipeline. Involving a wide assortment of consumers and stakeholders can help give you a consistent flow of ideas and concepts that you can use for new product development.

5. Accelerated time to market with new products and services. Co-creation’s feedback process weeds out misfit ideas quickly so that only the most promising ideas make it to the next steps. This iterative filtering works more quickly than it normally takes during new product development.[21]

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Famous Practitioners

Here is a short list of corporate businesses that use co-operation to improve their business.

Netflix, the online video rental service, uses crowdsourcing techniques to improve the software algorithms used to offer customer video recommendations. The team or individual that achieves key software goals will receive $1 million.

Eli Lily and DuPont have tapped online networks of researchers and technical experts, awarding cash prizes to people who can solve vexing R&D problems.

CambrianHouse.com lets the public submit ideas for software products, vote on them, and collect royalties if a participant's ideas are incorporated into products.

iStockphoto.com allows amateur and professional photographers, illustrators, and videographers to upload their work and earn royalties when their images are bought and downloaded. The company was acquired for $50 million by Getty Images.

Threadless.com lets online members submit T-shirt designs and vote on which ones should be produced.[22]

Starbucks lets users to write their ideas about the company's improvement on specially dedicated for it page on their website. [1]

Heineken created a prototype of future nightclub with help of several designers all over the world. [2]

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P&G allows regular gamers or users to supply ideas for the future innovations. [3]

Nokia attracts smart crowd to create new products and add value to the consumers. [4]

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Local Motors makes car models based on crowdsourced designs. [5]


Crowdsourcing in Medical Field

Crowdsourcing in the medical field is used to solve many difficult cases for patients that have diagnoses that may take years to solve. Medical crowdsourcing tools collect knowledge and theories from doctors, healthcare professionals, and others. Patients use the crowdsourcing site to upload information on their condition and may pay a fee to have their information reviewed by the site's professionals. The drawbacks of some crowdsourcing sites are the ability to gauge the quality of information [23]

CrowdMed

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CrowdMed.com is one of the most popular sites for crowdsourcing medical diagnoses. The site launched in 2013 as a way for patients to "Get a second opinion". Crowdmed allows medical professionals and the public to act as "medical detectives" and assist in diagnosing a patient. Moderators monitor the conversation to make sure that conclusions are based on peer-reviewed science. The site cost users up to $749 per month and higher costs allow users advice from higher-ranked medical detectives. The most helpful detectives on a case, which are decided by the patient, may receive a monetary reward.

Critics of the site say that the patients' diagnoses disregard conditions that may be formed due to a patient's psychology. Often times patients disregard diagnoses that suggest a mental health issue. [24]

Medical Crowdsourcing in Media

Medical crowdsourcing has appeared in shows such as “Diagnosis” and “Chasing the Cure”. On these shows, each episode focuses on a single individual's medical history for a condition that they have had difficulty diagnosing. Each episode often ends the patient either finding out the correct diagnosis or getting them closer to finding their diagnosis and connecting to them to qualified professionals. The negatives of these shows are that they post the patients' personal lives and symptoms publicly, and it opens them up to ridicule. The worst-case scenario of the shows “the crowd veers toward mob behavior, like when responders dismiss the suffering of a teenage girl plagued by unexplained vomiting …as psychosomatic”. [25] Using crowdsourcing doesn’t just allow medical professionals access to the patients but regular people. This may be seen as unethical because these people don’t have the same values as medical professionals. Medical professionals know not to stereotype patients or dismiss their symptoms.

References

  1. http://dailycrowdsource.com/training/crowdsourcing/what-is-crowdsourcing
  2. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-is-crowdsourcing/
  3. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/magazine/08wwln-safire-t.html?_r=4&ref=magazine&
  4. http://www.crowdsource.com/blog/2013/08/the-long-history-of-crowdsourcing-and-why-youre-just-now-hearing-about-it/
  5. http://www.crowdsource.com/blog/2013/08/the-long-history-of-crowdsourcing-and-why-youre-just-now-hearing-about-it/
  6. http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html?pg=4&topic=crowds&topic_set=
  7. http://www.crowdsource.com/blog/2013/08/the-long-history-of-crowdsourcing-and-why-youre-just-now-hearing-about-it/
  8. http://dailycrowdsource.com/training/crowdsourcing/what-is-crowdsourcing
  9. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204409004577157493201863200
  10. http://dailycrowdsource.com/training/crowdsourcing/what-is-crowdsourcing
  11. http://hbr.org/2013/04/using-the-crowd-as-an-innovation-partner/
  12. http://dailycrowdsource.com/training/crowdsourcing/what-is-crowdsourcing
  13. https://www.gofundme.com/history
  14. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-is-crowdsourcing/
  15. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204409004577157493201863200
  16. http://dailycrowdsource.com/training/crowdsourcing/what-is-crowdsourcing
  17. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-is-crowdsourcing/
  18. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-is-crowdsourcing/
  19. http://hbr.org/2013/04/using-the-crowd-as-an-innovation-partner/
  20. http://dailycrowdsource.com/training/crowdsourcing/what-is-crowdsourcing
  21. http://www.visioncritical.com/blog/cocreation-101#sthash.egAGqyxV.dpuf
  22. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-is-crowdsourcing/
  23. https://www.cslbehring.com/vita/2018/crowdsourcing-and-medical-mysteries-0628
  24. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/the-big-questions/how-crowdsourcing-transforming-diagnosis-rare-disorders-n728306
  25. https://www.inquirer.com/health/netflix-diagnosis-lisa-sanders-crowdsourcing-20190925.html