(I have found an interesting article in Dutch which I translated roughly for this blogpost. If you want, you can check below for the link)
You hear all kind of things about crowdsourcing nowadays like ‘Crowdsourcing is trending’, ‘Crowdsourcing grows exponentially.’ and so on.
But the big question is how hot is crowdsourcing actually and how much is this phenomenon growing?
A lot of big companies have been adapting this platform in recent years, nationally as internationally.
“More than 50% of Fortune 500 companies have made open innovation an integral part of their innovation strategy.” Open innovation extends to consumers, embracing their “knowledge, experiences, creativity and ideas are understood as valuable partners.”
A good example of a crowdsourcing initiative is the Lay’s ‘Maak de Smaak’ competition, where 5,8 million times have been ‘battled’ for the best taste in chips. It has been a good exposure for Lay’s marketing.
If you look through Google Insights you can see that the amount of links and articles increased which have mentioned ‘crowdsourcing’.
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Also, when you are talking about the insights and trends, the Gartner’s Hype Cycle cannot be missed out. Every year the company Gartner places important ’emerging’ technologies on a curve, to determine in what stadium a hype the certain technology is in. In 2012 you can see that ‘crowdsourcing’ is in the curve, but has not reached it’s peak yet. It will be another 5-10 years before crowdsourcing will be a irreplaceable technology in the business, according to Gartner.
There has been a lot of crowdsourcing platforms worldwide. According to the American crowdsourcing company ‘Massolution’ there are some remarkable factors given in their industry report 2012 about these platforms.
- The crowdsourcing market is booming. In 2011 there has been nearly $300 million invested in platforms and the earnings of these crowdsourcing platforms have been increased with 75% in one year time
- Especially big companies with capital above 1 billion dollar are the early adopters of crowdsourcing.
- 60% of the crowd comes from either USA or Europe, where a big part are high educated and having a fulltime job.
- 52% of the companies who has used a crowdsourcing platform, will be using it at least one time again in the future.
It is undeniable that crowdsourcing platforms are here to stay in the future. The variety of crowdsourcing platforms have been growing every day. Also the interest is growing exponentially, which is seen in the amount of investment and sales which have been realized through these platforms. What this phenomenon will bring in the future, we don’t know, but all we know is that it has given some brilliant and creative solutions from the customers.
Sources:
http://www.marketingfacts.nl/berichten/crowdsourcing-de-stand-van-zaken
http://www.affinnova.com/blog/bid/103589/Review-of-a-Decade-of-Netnography-Research
http://www.crowdsourcing.org/editorial/enterprise-crowdsourcing-research-report-by-massolution/11736
