Crowdsourcing: What It Means for Innovation

(page 2 of 2)

Customers, of course, are increasingly demanding participation. They expect the ability to co-create and lead innovation, and their volubility has forced companies to devise creative solutions to be competitive in a new bottom-up age. Procter & Gamble (PG), Starbucks (SBUX), Dell (DELL), Best Buy (BBY), Threadless, and Nike (NKE) have all created digital platforms that allow customers to help them create new products and messages. Starbucks received over 17,000 coffee ideas in the first 14 months since the launch of its proprietary online forum, mystarbucksidea.com.

Jump In and Try

Managing those submissions in an effective manner is, of course, another challenge altogether. And the biggest struggle for companies that dip their toes in crowdsourced water is to shift from having a reactive culture to one that's proactive. There's a delicate balance between encouraging participation and maintaining clarity of overall business objectives. As with any good conversation, a give-and-take dialogue is necessary, and every company will develop its own way of handling that debate. Most excitingly, new forms of social editing will emerge that allow customers, experts, and brand advocates to curate crowd-created ideas to sort through the ideas and stay on strategy. For now, the most important thing is to jump in and try.

Another challenge for anyone entering the co-creation/crowdsourcing arena is how to compensate people fairly for their ideas. While crowdsourcing will take the slack out of the system, it could seriously depress wages for anyone pursuing a career in advertising, graphic design, and industrial design. This worries me a great deal. It also represents a much larger issue that other industries, including journalism and photography, are grappling with as well. I wish I could tell you how it'll be resolved, but no one has figured this out yet.

As crowdsourcing continues to accelerate, the biggest question is how it will affect business writ large. But it will certainly usher in radical changes to business models and business systems. The question for creative agencies is whether they can wake up, react to what's going on, engage the crowd, and make themselves a part of the new reality.

John Winsor is author of Spark: Be more Innovative through Co-Creation and Beyond the Brand: Why Engaging the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business. Currently, he is the VP/Executive Director of Strategy and Innovation at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky.

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.