Posts tagged crowdsourcing
Ignite innovation? Lower costs? Turn to the crowds.
Mar 3rd
Buying incremental bits of people’s time, talent, and experience through “crowd-sourcing” is an incredibly important trend, yet it’s s still flying under the radar for most companies.
To learn more about this development, I attended a crowdsourcing conference and learned from experts from GE, Microsoft, eBay, NASA and other leading companies. The conference was created by {grow} community member David Bratvold and his company Daily Crowdsource. David did an excellent job bringing together cutting-edge thinkers in this space and unearthing the vast opportunities … and controversies … surrounding this trend. Here are a few highlights from the world’s crowd-sourcing experts:
Stephen Shapiro, author of Best Practices are Stupid, talked about the echo chamber of innovation facing most companies who don’t look outside for ideas. ”Expertise is the enemy of innovation,” he said. “People return to the same safe grooves in their brain. In a room full of rocket scientists, adding one more rocket scientist is probably not going to make a difference. Breakthroughs come from different domains of expertise, connecting ideas and perspectives that were previously unconnected.”
Bryan Saftler of Microsoft covered three possible negatives of crowd-sourcing:
- Ownership rights. How do you know somebody creates something original when it may not be?
- Crowdsourcing is an open process — do you want your competition to see it?
- Crowd-sourcing the wrong thing. R&D should probably be an internal activity if you want a competitive advantage. Should be a discrete problem, not an open-ended problem.
There was quite a bit of debate over this last point, as other participants argued about the benefits of putting R&D problems out to the crowds, including …
Jason Crusan of NASA – NASA is using crowd-sourcing extensively to solve problems ranging from long-term space food packaging to component design for the International Space Station. He said that the key to extracting extreme value from open innovation is tied to generating a vast number of solutions — you can’t get to the “long tail” of break-through thinking unless you get a large number of responses. As this field progresses, the challenge is sorting and finding that superior solution. Software is being developed to manage this.
NASA is running many open-ended “competitions” to generate ideas with cash prizes for the best solutions. The key to success is very carefully defining what needs to be solved. 85 percent of the solutions they’ve found have come from innovators outside the U.S., making NASA a world space agency. NASA has been so successful crowd-sourcing solutions to complex problems that it is now teaching other agencies such as Medicare how to use these strategies.
Max Yankelevich of Crowd Computing Systems — How do you tap into the “cognitive surplus” of the world, and your own employees, beyond mundane micro-tasks? Artificial intelligence promises to take crowd sourcing beyond commodity tasks like photo tagging and sentiment analysis and move into more complex large-scale tasks. “We are heading to a freelance economy,” he said. “And this will be enabled by algorithms. With the application of AI to crowdsourcing, eventually there will be no limit to the complexity of the tasks that will be able to be crowd-sourced.”
Dori Albert of Lionbridge showed how even highly sensitive projects are opportunities for crowd-sourcing. Technology has progressed so that even secure data — like tax forms — can be processed through crowd-sourced models. Data forms are broken up into snips that are sent out so that no single person can see data from the same form — information is transmitted out of context. Every piece of work is sent out to two different people (dual sourced) to provide over 99.9% accuracy. The work (or “snips”) are then re-assembled into the original tax forms and sent back to the state governments in a form that highlights problems and under-payments.
The primary benefit is that state tax entities have cut their tax form processing costs by 50 percent and collected millions of dollars in additional taxes by more thoroughly identifying under-payments.
Dr. Lisa Kennedy, Chief Marketing Officer of General Electric’s healthymagination program showed an example of a 15-year-old boy who invented a diagnostic tool for pancreatic cancer. Innovation is happening in the most unlikely ways, in the most unlikely places. “Innovation is being democratized,” she said. Very sophisticated tools and datasets are available for anyone to use for their own investigations and experiments. Crowd-sourced healthcare breakthroughs are occurring in bio-engineering, cancer research, treatment, imaging, and diagnostics.
GE has created the healthymagination toolbox to put information in the hands of “garage inventors.” MedStartr is a crowdfunding site for life sciences ideas. GE wants to help inventors use big data to solve problems. “Let’s face it,” she said, “your local pizza parlor is probably doing a better job using data analysis to learn about you than your doctor.”
James Rubinstein of eBay talked about the need to do intense research on your customers by asking the right questions. eBay uses crowd-sourced workers to help tag products and refine search terms with search results. The trick is, finding the right workers with the right skills to be effective. He gave examples that showed how search keywords can have wildly different meanings in different parts of the world. Frame of reference is also important — People who love fashion are the best people to match to fashion-related projects. Constantly testing to make sure they have the right workers on the right projects is essential to crowdsource success.
Stephen Paljieg, Senior Market Development Manager for Kimberly Clark said that “Ideas area limited by the people in our company, the experience in our company, and the budget in our company. Yet ideas are abundant! We can liberate the brand promise by opening up our future to our customers.”
The company’s Huggies brand sponsors crowd-sourced innovations from their “mom” customers. “There are more than 6 million women entrepreneurs in the U.S. yet less that 3 percent of venture capital goes to women-owned businesses. We see this as a huge opportunity.” The Huggies brand is experimenting with a mom-funding effort to provide grants to customer-inspired new businesses. “Not only are we driving innovation, we’re showing that we are willing to invest in our customers.”
The company has created goodwill and PR with the program but has not yet created a product that can be sold through Kimberly-Clark.
BONUS CONTENT
I had a chance to catch up with Clint Bonner, VP -Marketing for Top Coder, for an interview. With access to 450,000 resources in 200 countries, Top Coder has become a leading crowd-sourcing resource for many top brands. How do you manage 450,000 resources? What is the opportunity for smaller businesses? Let’s find out in the brief video interview:
Click here if you can’t view the video interview with Clint Bonner of Top Coder.
Are you using crowd-sourcing? Any opportunities to create competitive advantage for your business?
Disclosure: Daily Crowdsource, the sponsor of Crowdopolis, provided me the opportunity to attend this event for free.
Illustration: Photos by Mavis, Flickr Creative Commons
Case studies: Using the social web for new product development
Jan 10th
I’m delighted to present today eight exciting new mini-case studies which demonstrate the power of social collaboration to create business value through new product development. These were curated by Amy Kenly and her team at innovation consulting firm Kalypso (Amy will also be a speaker at the April 27 Social Slam event!)
I think you’re going to be energized by these inspiring ideas!
Business Challenge: Getting real time analysis of which future candle scents customers would be most likely to favor.
Project Details: Instead of relying on traditional market research and trend analysis, Diamond Candles developed a way to crowdsource idea submission and voting from their existing customers. The company then takes the top 10% of voter suggestions and cross-references that with market trend analysis to make final decisions on new scents to launch.
Results: The program received more than 250 new product ideas and 5,000 customer votes in just one month. This has established a plan for the company’s R&D efforts.
Business Challenge: The Coca-Cola unit wanted to utilize Vitamin Water’s Facebook fanbase to design a new flavor.
Project Details: Vitamin Water’s flavor “Connect” was developed by the company’s Facebook fanbase; one Facebook fan won $5,000 for her role in development of the new flavor. The competition allowed VitaminWater’s Facebook fans to develop all aspects of the product, from selecting the flavor to designing the packaging and naming the product.
Results: More than 2 million VitaminWater Facebook fans participated in the new product development effort.
Business Challenge: Identifying a biomarker for ALS (Lou Gehrig Disease), a progressive and fatal neuro-degenerative disease.
Project Details: Working with the online crowdsourcing organization InnoCentive, Prize4Life launched a $1 million challenge to find an accurate way to track the progression of ALS and reduce the cost of ALS clinical trials. At least 50 teams competed from 18 different countries. Prize4Life’s Scientific Advisory Board voted to award the ALS Biomarker Prize to Dr. Seward Rutkove. As a result, Dr. Rutkove’s work has been accelerated and gained the attention of researchers from around the world.
Results: Using the biomarker discovered by Dr. Seward Rutkove reduced the cost for a clinical trial by 50 percent or more. As a result, the time required to determine the therapeutic benefit of a given drug in a clinical trial is shorter and requires fewer patients. This translates to potential therapies moving more quickly through the development pipeline, accelerating progress towards a treatment or cure for ALS, and creating incentive to invest resources in ALS drug development.
Business Challenge: To develop effective new ideas that address childhood obesity by increasing physical activity in “tweens.”
Project Details: HopeLab, a nonprofit organization, created a competition called Ruckus Nation to address childhood obesity by using the global social web to generate ideas for products that will help kids stay active.
Results: HopeLab received more than 400 entries from 37 countries and 41 U.S. states. In tests conducted by HopeLab, many of the ideas submitted have displayed strong potential for HopeLab’s product development efforts and six ideas resulted in patent applications.
Business Challenge: Develop products that solve customer problems, meet a need or increase efficiencies, on a limited research & development budget.
Project Details: Madison Electric’s commitment to innovation led the company to launch the Sparks Innovation Center- the industry’s first crowdsourced, collaborative approach to product development. Through their website (www.meproducts.net/sparks), anyone is invited to submit ideas for new products. The Madison Electric team assesses each idea’s merit, and the best ideas are then presented to a focus group through the company’s online Contractor Forum.
Results: Generating nearly 100 submissions thus far, the Sparks Innovation Center has been the point of origin for five profitable new Madison Electric products and another four are currently now in the production phase. The center has evolved into a go-to resource for inventors and aspiring entrepreneurs in the electronics industry.
Business Challenge: Managing resources throughout multiple time zones, geographies and languages to deliver new products and version releases.
Project Details: To address the challenges in managing a far-flung internal development staff, CDC Software relies on social network technologies to develop and deliver software from teams around the world. These social technologies are used at each step of the development process, including the commercial effort.
Results: CDC cut the time of product delivery from 24 months to 12-16 weeks. These cloud-based social technologies have promoted tight collaboration among their R&D offices across 14 countries, streamlined knowledge transfer and cut costs.
Business Challenge: Accelerating time to market and time to revenue generation.
Project Details: The Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform Business Unit (ECP BU) is a cross-functional development group that included team members from program management, product management, user experience, engineering, quality assurance, and their executive sponsors. This team used an internal social platform to create a collaborative community and integrate their work processes and achieve rapid product iterations.
Results: The team delivered its first major release within 12 months, a reduced product time to market that equated to an average 12 percent productivity gain per employee, or 28,000 labor hours.
Business Challenge: Leveraging knowledge and ideas beyond the company walls to develop new power grid technologies.
Project Details: In 2010, GE announced the Ecomagination Challenge, a global contest that was an open call for power grid innovations. Together with top venture capital firms, GE committed up to $200 million to help entrepreneurs develop their ideas and bring them to market. $100,000 awards were offered for each of five winning ideas along with the potential to collaborate with GE and its VC partners. Ideas were routed to subject matter experts and a final panel of judges to determine the winners.
Results: The Ecoimagination Challenge website had 70,000 participants from more than 150 countries, contributing 3,844 ideas and more than 120,000 votes. Twelve projects were selected to partner with GE and received development funds totaling $55 million. The contest’s most popular submissions received a $50,000 cash award and GE also granted $100,000 each for five promising products ideas.
So there you have it — some really awesome examples of social networking and global collaboration. What had an impact on you?
Enterprise Crowdsourcing blasts off as social media growth industry
Dec 13th
Guest post by David Bratvold
As buzzwords go, “crowdsourcing” may not be as big as ”social-media” or “mobile apps” but new research show it is one of the most rapidly-expanding trends in our field.
Crowdsourcing represents an epic shift in the world of labor, automation, and information science, one with large economic and ethical implications. Everybody is looking at this trend and wondering, “How big is the market?” “How fast is it changing?” and “Which companies should I be working with?” So the Daily Crowdsource is beginning to explore some of those questions through original research.
To answer these questions accurately, we took the last three months to perform a thorough analysis of enterprise-grade microtasking vendors and produced a market report. We chose the ‘microtasking’ sector to start with because it’s one of the two sectors that enterprises can benefit from the most. Here’s what we found:
There are currently six enterprise-grade microtasking providers: Clickworker, CrowdFlower, CrowdSource, Microtask, Microworkers, & Serv.io (aka CloudCrowd). The earliest of these appeared in November 2005, and the most recent appeared September 2010.
If you’re wondering why Amazon’s MTurk isn’t on the list, it’s because they operate quite differently than the evaluated providers. MTurk, though one of the largest and most well-known suppliers of microtasks, lacks the quality & validation checks that enterprise clients require. Although enterprises can develop their own quality-assurance system in Mturk, the value of sophisticated, field-tested algorithms far outweigh the cost increases associated with using one of these other six quality-focused platforms.
The market demand for crowd-sourced work quintupled in 2010 & almost quadrupled in 2011:
Despite being around for six years, the microtasking field was in the testing phase for the first three years. Several platforms were revamped, relaunched, or finally “released” in 2009. Client adoption was also slow until 2009 when the first surge in market demand occurred. Last year, the number of completed microtasks increased 496% over 2009. The number of tasks completed in 2011 is estimated to increase 355%
These are part of the findings of our extensive report on crowdsourcing trends and research.
Despite this quick growth, the field is still in its infancy. How quickly it will mature is yet to be seen. Is this growth sustainable? One clue to this answer is that microtasking has yet to be adopted by many large companies. This rate of adoption is also increasing so 2012 could be another years of explosive growth for this nascent industry.
With the growing importance (and controversy) of microtasking, it’s critical that we start measuring and understanding these trends. This is the first of what I hope will be a series of research efforts to understand this business model.
Have you experimented with crowdsourcing yet? How could you use it?
David Bratvold is the founder of Daily Crowdsource, the #1 site for crowdsourcing news, training & resources. His goal is to educate business professionals on the benefits of crowdsourcing. He will present more of his findings at Social Slam 2012.
The Top Five Crowdsourcing Mega-trends
Aug 31st
I had my eyes opened to the massive growth of the crowdsourcing industry at a SXSW panel earlier this year. Ever since then, I have been looking for an opportunity to bring more information on this trend to {grow}. I’m fortunate today to have an expert on the subject, David Bratvold, provide a guest post:
If you’re not yet familiar with crowdsourcing, it’s a new work process that involves getting a crowd of people to help with a task typically performed by one employee or contractor. Imagine needing a new logo for your business. Rather than hire a freelancer, agency, or in-house designer, with crowdsourcing you can post your need and several designers will compete and create a custom logo just for you.
While this is a common example, today crowdsourcing extends far beyond simple graphic design and can be broken down into four main subcategories:
- Microtasks -
Taking a project and breaking it into tiny bits as seen on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (“the online marketplace for work.”). Each crowd worker can only see his little bit of the project. You could hire one person to label 1,000 photos or hire 1,000 people to each label 1 photo. - Macrotasks -
Similar to microtasks, however, workers can see more, if not all, of the project and can get involved with any portions they are knowledgeable in. This form is most common with solving complex problems such as the X-Prize or seeking out a better recommendation algorithm for Netflix. - Crowdfunding -
Getting a crowd to help fund your cause or project. It’s unique because you set a monetary goal and deadline and you must get fully funded by your deadline or you’ll get nothing. Here is a list of 13 crowdfunding sites. - Crowd Contests -
Asking a crowd for work and only providing compensation to the chosen entries. Commonly seen in design sites like 99designs, and the graphic design example in the opening paragraph.
(For a more thorough explanation, read “What is Crowdsourcing.”)
As the early stages of crowdsourcing continue to gain momentum, there are a few megatrends worth keeping your eye on.
1) Curated Crowds
The bigger your crowd doesn’t necessarily mean better output when it comes to crowdsourcing. This has been made apparent with the early days of crowdsourcing design sites. A design contest yielding 1,000 designs can become simply unmanageable. If you offer a prize large enough, any monkey with a crayon could contribute. I’m not saying a large crowd produces bad results, I’m simply stating there will be bad among the good. Luckily, there are almost always a lot of great designs, but it takes extra time to sift out the bad.
Sites like Genius Rocket have begun shifting to a curated crowd model. Anyone can request to join their crowd, however, they must prove they’re talented before being able to participate in some projects, or even at all. LogoTournament has been silently curating their crowd since the early days.
2) Quality Improvements
As microtasking gains in adoption, more crowdsourcing platforms are seeing success with adding an extra level of quality control on top of the basic input – output model made popular by MTurk. If you’ve used MTurk, you’re fully aware the results you get may be less than correct. Sites like Serv.io & Microtask have added extra redundancy and QA checks to ensure high levels of accuracy. If a client requests it, Serv.io can maintain perfect accuracy when needed. As this option becomes more available, people will be demanding 99.9%-100% accuracy, considering it doesn’t incur a lot of extra expense.
3) The Standardization of Crowdsourcing
As it’s been pointed out, crowdsourcing is not an industry, it’s currently an undefined space. The current leaders in crowdsourcing are working to define this space and standardize as much as we can. Groups like the Crowdsortium are for players within crowdsourcing to discuss what’s going on. Daily Crowdsource, along with David Alan Grier, are leading the pack towards standardization. Grier has been pushing for a trade association for quite some time, and recently has begun publicly discussing it. Daily Crowdsource, Grier, and other leaders are working to define the official taxonomy of crowdsourcing. All these recent motions are to help standardize crowdsourcing in order to ensure a healthy future.
4) Corporate Acceptance
Crowdsourcing isn’t just a fad for early adopters. In fact, several Fortune 100 corporations have taken a big step into crowdsourcing. General Electric is leading the charge with multiple million dollar open innovation projects. Others like General Motors, Procter & Gamble, and PepsiCo continue to execute crowdsourcing projects (not just one-off publicity stunts). Amazon even built one of the largest
crowdsourcing platforms. It’s not often a new process is adopted so quickly by large corporations, but this will make it easier for other Fortune 100 corporations to begin crowdsourcing, which will trickle down to smaller corporations.
5) Early Adoption
Although you may be familiar with the term, crowdsourcing is still in the early adoption phase. A very small percentage of people are familiar with everything crowdsourcing can do. Sure, any tech geek can name 99designs, but can you list 10 other uses of crowdsourcing? Were you aware you could build a car, stress test your website, or volunteer your “waiting in line” minutes to a charity all with the help of crowdsourcing?
Have you tried crowd-sourcing yet? What are your favorite applications and success stories?
David Bratvold is the founder of Daily Crowdsource, the #1 site for crowdsourcing news. His goal is to educate business professionals on the benefits of crowdsourcing.
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