This week’s topic is about crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. These are two phenomena which are increasingly used by companies for projects, new products or even company start-ups.
One of the biggest challenges companies face with crowdsourcing is to figure out what the best way of gathering the crowd is: How can you get the ‘crowd’ to do what you want? I took an example of the Lay’s ‘maak de smaak’ campaign and put it in a genetable as described in the article titled: ‘The Collective Intelligence Genome’ to help find out why this campaign was such a success. The big success factor was the decision making process were they combined the crowd with a professional jury to get people engaged with the campaign.
Next I compared Threadless with another quite similar company named: Redbubble. Instead of using a competition to decide which design should be printed, they simply market every design that is submitted. I compared to two companies and tried to figure were they differentiate and which business model is better.
Although Threadless has a huge fan base and a lot of engaged customers, Redbubble also seems promising with rising revenues ever since its start-up in 2006.
