The three billion

Enterprise crowdsourcing and the growing fragmentation of work

There are new and emerging opportunities for organisations in all sectors to create and deliver compelling services for their customers using the power of disruptive innovation. This paper aims to help business and public sector leaders understand the cultural and organisational challenges that are inevitably brought by the use of crowdsourcing, and provides them with the insights they need to overcome them.

Considering crowdsourcing

Today's innovation problems are tough to solve. The traditional methods that have served your enterprise well for decades no longer seem to work, and your current crop of young, talented millennials don't want to stick around to help. Exponentially advancing technology, a rapidly growing online worker population and improved access to education all add up to a confusing medley of options.

  • Should you be thinking about crowdsourcing?
  •  Is it only for start-ups and small businesses or can it be used at enterprise scale?
  •  Can crowdsourcing be useful for more than just a technology solution?
  •  What are the 'killer apps' and how do they work? 
  • How do you manage the crowd to create value? 
  • And what are the cultural and commercial challenges you will face?

In the following pages, we take a close look at crowdsourcing and tackle these questions.

The crowd provides an array of different approaches to help enterprises operate more efficiently amid ongoing shifts in policy, science, technology and skills, and the fluidity exhibited by the wider economy.

Businesses and other organisations are finding that the crowd can help with a wide range of challenges, from simple rote tasks, like image labelling, raising money or voting, through to far more complex problems, like brainstorming ideas, designing new products or even strategic planning.

Crowdsourced problems can be vast in scope, such as SETIlive, a 'citizen science' project conducted by Zooniverse in conjunction with the SETI Institute, which asked people all over the world to help with the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Or requests can be exquisitely precise, such as seeking a new technology to remove microbubbles from extracorporeal bloodstreams, a current challenge competition managed by InnoCentive.

So how can you choose what crowdsourcing approach is right for you?

Using the crowd in enterprise

The crowdsourcing ecosystem is still relatively young but as new platforms and use-cases emerge, the potential for disruptive impact on the enterprise is significant. In shifting towards a more 'outside-in' approach to problem solving, for example, crowdsourcing changes the way that businesses, public sector organisations and other enterprises create value.

The size of a company, the number of employees, the tools and other intellectual property developed, or the exclusive agreements a company has with partners in its supply chain no longer limit the capacity of any organisation to discover and apply knowledge.

Instead, it is the greater access to knowledge the crowd provides and, in particular, the frictionless flows of diverse ideas enabled by crowdsourcing that now create value.

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The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.