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Crowdsourcing

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- StumbleUpon. Crowdsourcing is not just for new entrants challenging established players; the latter can also leverage crowdsourcing to their advantage, enabling users to design new products and testing the demand at the same time. And for the younger generation, this is simply a normal way of doing things. That’s the key lesson I learned this morning as I heard my youngest son explain the genesis of his Lego Minecraft set. Agility Lego is not exactly a start-up. With its $1bn annual revenue for the first time in more than half a century of selling plastic bricks, it has become a mammoth of the toy industry, but a nimble mammoth, one that seems quite able to adapt to the climate change of product design in the age of crowdsourcing.

After testing the concept for three years in Japan, Lego has recently gone global with the beta-version of its Cuusoo crowdsourcing platform. Transparency The rules of the game are simple: any user can submit a product design, which other users will be able to vote for. 1. 2. Jade Magnet » Blog Archive » Top Indian brands go crowdsourcing in 2012!

40 Examples of Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing. We can call it open innovation, crowdsourcing or co-creation – or something else. In short, it is about bringing external input to an innovation process and this is no longer a buzzword. Companies are learning that they must embrace this paradigm shift of innovation in order to keep up with the competition and those that are lagging behind, well, they will find themselves to be in big trouble in the coming years. This list of corporate initiatives is worth looking into if you want to get an idea of what is happening with the open innovation, crowdsourcing and co-creation today. NOTE: The process of bringing external input into an innovation process requires lots of work that is often not visible to the public.

So when you go through this list of examples, please remember that these companies have other initiatives related to open innovation. Audi Production Award In this competition, Audi asks questions such as: How will people work in production? Akzo Nobel Open Space BASF Future Business. Collaborating With Customer Communities: Lessons From the Lego Group. One point for crowdsourcing: Gamers solve protein structure of AIDS-like protein. Academic representations of crowdsourcing, co-creation and open innovation. As part of my work as a PhD student, I read lots of papers about open innovation and/or participative marketing.

These papers are highly interesting but, I must admit, sometimes a little repelling with huge chunks of texts, references and citations. Visualizations of the described phenomena are greatly helpful to understand some of this information… I thought it would be interesting to gather a couple of visualizations of my research interests: crowdsourcing, co-creation and open innovation in a blog post ! This is not only quite entertaining, but might help people out there find new sources. Here we go… Crowdsourcing has first been defined as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call” (Howe, 2006). Whitla, P. (2009). Schenk, E., & Guittard, C. (2010). The above visulization is drawn from a paper I recently discovered.

Lampel, J., Jha, P. Explosion! Crowdsourcing for Marketing and Innovation. In an interactive timeline, called Crowdsourcing by World’s Best Global Brands, we show how the use of crowdsourcing has exploded since the early 2000′s. The objective of this timeline was to have a rich and visual representation of how brands increasingly use of crowdsourcing to pursue marketing- and innovation-related business objectives. To make it as comprehensive as possible, you are invited to contribute to this interactive document by submitting crowdsourcing cases that you know of. Contributors will be listed in the timeline presentation, and it’s also possible to link to your website.

This timeline shows how the world’s most valuable brands (the 100 brands included in Interbrand’s Best Global Brands ranking) have used crowdsourcing, and how they’re continuously doing it. Rather than being a one-time illustration, it is intended to become a participative document to gather and display information about brand-sponsored crowdsourcing initiatives. image credit: pow.cx. Feds Challenge Innovators to Build a Crowdsourced Pollution Monitoring Network. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are conducting a contest challenging innovators to develop a system that could turn thousands — or even millions — of citizens into walking pollution-monitoring stations.

Under the “My Air, My Health” challenge, the EPA and the HHS are offering $160,000 in prizes for creating “a personal, portable, near-real-time, location-specific system to monitor and report air pollutants and potentially related physiological parameters.” Lots of solid research has connected air pollutants to physiological effects. But what the feds hope to do is develop a network of location-aware mobile monitoring stations — attached to people — that can provide a large-scale, “crowdsourced” base of data that makes a continual connection between the air pollutants people encounter in their daily lives and the effects on their health. + My Air, My Health Challenge. Wikicare: 5 Leading UK-based P2P Healthcare Initiatives. Dell and Starbucks crowdsource high volumes of ideas. If you are considering crowdsourcing in a B to C (Business to Consumer) environment then it is worth looking at what companies like Dell and Starbucks do.

They both encourage customers to submit ideas on almost any topic they want whereas companies like P&G are very focused and directive in what they ask for. Take a look at Dell’s Ideastorm Site where you can submit your idea and vote or comment on the ideas of others. The counts they give are interesting: 17,000 ideas submitted 738,000 votes 96,000 comments 507 ideas implemented So after a lot of activity 2.9% of the ideas submitted have been implemented. The Starbucks site is called My Starbucks Idea. 84,000 product ideas 30,000 experience ideas 20,000 involvement ideas They list just 200 ideas as implemented which is a tiny percentage.

If you scroll around the sites you will see that the level of customer interaction is high. Paul Sloane Comments are closed. Barclaycard Turns to Crowd-sourcing to Build a Better Credit Card. The new Barclaycard Ring MasterCard aims to be both simple and social. But more than ease of use, what the company is really pushing about the new card is that holders will have a say — up to a point — in how it is managed, serviced and even marketed by participating in an online community. “This could be a major step in the likely application of ‘crowd-sourced everything’ to consumer credit,” says Wharton business and public policy professor Jeremy Tobacman. “Card issuers, craving gimmicks that will help them attract attention and stand out in the genuinely cutthroat competition for new accounts, could view this as an interesting marketing salvo.” Billed by the company as the first “crowd-sourced” credit card, the product has been in pilot testing since December and opened to the general public last month.

It comes with an 8% APR that applies to all balances, including purchases, transfers and cash advances. In addition, customers won’t have to pay a penalty APR if they default.