Crowdsourcing innovation is still unorthodox in most industries. It’s a tough call; the process can be risky, since it requires dedicated transparency, mass alignment and communication, logistical management, and often, a major shift in the way things are done across a company. But evidence is mounting that demonstrates the many benefits of crowdsourcing innovation, from increased revenue to competitive advantage, faster output, and dramatically improved processes.
Here are 3 must-read articles to help you understand how crowdsourcing innovation could work wonders for your business.
You Need an Innovation Strategy
From the Harvard Business Review:
“A strategy is nothing more than a commitment to a set of coherent, mutually reinforcing policies or behaviors aimed at achieving a specific competitive goal. Good strategies promote alignment among diverse groups within an organization, clarify objectives and priorities, and help focus efforts around them. Companies regularly define their overall business strategy (their scope and positioning) and specify how various functions—such as marketing, operations, finance, and R&D—will support it. But during my more than two decades studying and consulting for companies in a broad range of industries, I have found that firms rarely articulate strategies to align their innovation efforts with their business strategies.
Without an innovation strategy, innovation improvement efforts can easily become a grab bag of much-touted best practices: dividing R&D into decentralized autonomous teams, spawning internal entrepreneurial ventures, setting up corporate venture-capital arms, pursuing external alliances, embracing open innovation and crowdsourcing, collaborating with customers, and implementing rapid prototyping, to name just a few. There is nothing wrong with any of those practices per se. The problem is that an organization’s capacity for innovation stems from an innovation system: a coherent set of interdependent processes and structures that dictates how the company searches for novel problems and solutions, synthesizes ideas into a business concept and product designs, and selects which projects get funded. Individual best practices involve trade-offs. And adopting a specific practice generally requires a host of complementary changes to the rest of the organization’s innovation system. A company without an innovation strategy won’t be able to make trade-off decisions and choose all the elements of the innovation system.
Aping someone else’s system is not the answer. There is no one system that fits all companies equally well or works under all circumstances. There is nothing wrong, of course, with learning from others, but it is a mistake to believe that what works for, say, Apple (today’s favorite innovator) is going to work for your organization. An explicit innovation strategy helps you design a system to match your specific competitive needs.”
Crowdsourcing and Lead Generation
From Crowdsourcing.org:
Crowdsourcing is arguably most common in the IT industry, and perhaps because the most tech savvy individuals are always wired to broadband internet connectivity. Additionally, technology is an industry with many challenges, and no single corporation and no single organization is considered to be perfect. Therefore, crowdsourcing is an ideal platform for IT and other industries, running challenges ranging from security issues, to bugs and incorrect coding algorithms, to marketing and generating leads for your business.
In the past, businesses generated their leads by spending vast resources on marketing campaigns up-front, with hopes to attract new clients. With the advent of web 2.0, technologies coupled with robust technological campaigns such as crowdsourcing-based lead generation, enterprises have discovered better and efficient ways to generate business leads and possible customers. A new strategy to create lead generation has emerged and organizations today are embarking on a paradigm shift leveraging people (customers, employees, and influencers). Organizations are now influencing prospects’ buying decisions, courtesy of a niche community that propels leads on their behalf.
Crowdsourcing-based lead generation is implicitly tied to viral social marketing. The key goal is to enhance long-term lead generation channels that consistently push business leads on behalf of the company brand using human power. Since viral social marketing campaigns are driven by individuals and tend to automatically generate new leads for a business, it is inherently a type of crowdsourcing used for lead generation purposes.”
Mobile Innovation: Why it Pays to Leverage a Community of Minds
From Appirio:
“The reason for the growing relationship between mobile apps and crowdsourcing stems from economics. The rollout of new devices, rising expectations of employees for a consumer-grade mobile experience at work, and a shift to digital business are driving the demand for enterprise mobile apps. But a lack of resources and internal development talent is proving to be a major barrier to supplying this demand. Crowdsourcing provides the perfect solution to fill this gap, while actually improving potential outcomes.
Our research has shown that crowdsourcing can produce up to 65 percent more development output than traditional sources. This increase in output comes from the fact that with crowdsourcing customers pay for results, not time. Because a community of minds all working toward the same solution can provide multiple solutions, the time and iterations required to get to the enterprise mobile solution needed is greatly reduced. Not surprisingly, this kind of payoff in spending on mobile innovation is starting to get noticed. As Gartner predicts, within the next 3 years, over 75 percent of high-performing enterprises will be using some type of crowdsourcing for business process services.”
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