Crowd Sourcing Innovation – The New Approach to Problem Solving
What Is Crowd-Sourcing ?
The rapid integration of internet in businesses and in our daily lives has led to a plethora of innovations and adoption of new value creating techniques . One of these is crowd-sourcing which may either be performed under monetary or non-monetary incentives . Crowd-sourcing in essence is the activity which allows businesses to outsource the tasks that were originally performed by businesses or organizations themselves to a heterogeneous mass of potential individuals . Normally , this occurs via the internet in order to connect to the customers and to create value for innovative and creative suggestions .
Why Crowd-Source ?
A number of businesses benefit from the potential value created through outsourcing as it allows them to gain valuable insight from the knowledge base of internet users . Firms are increasingly adopting the outsourcing process by publishing their research and development problems and issues on different online crowd-sourcing platforms . This way a large community of individuals , working independently or in similar situations is able to solve the issues that are posted . Crowd-sourcing therefore makes room for open innovation and integration of an outside-in learning process . This implies that external knowledge is being integrated into the organization ' s operations and processes . Similarly , an inside-out learning process also occurs simultaneously , where internally developed innovations are being commercialized on a global platform .
The growth of crowd-sourcing systems on the internet has been phenomenal in the past decade . What ' s more is that this effort has been dubbed many new names such as community systems , user generated or user powered content , collaborative systems and peer production systems . Defining a crowd-sourcing system is therefore tricky as it aims to enlist masses that explicitly pool resources and collaborate in order to create an artifact that is beneficial and advantageous to a particular entity or to the community . While many may view this definition to be a tad restrictive , it is worth mentioning here that no particular definition of collaboration applies here and that a crowd-sourcing system may generally be viewed as a problem solving methodology .