Crowdsourcing is the process of getting work done, usually online, from a crowd of people. The word is a combination of the words ‘crowd’ and ‘outsourcing’. The idea is to take work and outsource it to a crowd of workers. (Bratvold 2016) The biggest example of crowdsourcing is Wikipedia. Instead of making an encyclopaedia itself, they gave the crowd the possibility to share their knowledge. It’s the most comprehensive encyclopaedia the world has ever seen. The idea of crowdsourcing comes from the principle the more heads the better. The more people that share ideas, skills, thoughts and knowledge the better the quality of the work.
There are different types of crowdsourcing, you have design platforms where you can ask the crowd for creating logo’s, websites and marketing. Microtasking is dividing a big project into smaller projects, and bring it back together later on in the process. This way you can divide the work, and get things done quicker. Asking the crowd to donate money for your project, is called crowdfunding. This way small businesses can make a head start. In my opinion this is a very good way of getting things done, without exactly borrowing money.
Just imagine if you are the owner of a company who sells healthy food and you really want a new logo for your company, but you are not creative at all. You can just post your demand on a design platform and tell the crowd what you want, how much you will pay and what the deadline is. The people who are interested in making logo’s will react and you will have a wide range of choice. You can reach so many different people with different ideas.
The biggest benefit of crowdsourcing is the ability to receive a lot of knowledge and good quality results for several people. They can post their best ideas, share their skills and give support. I think the biggest down side of crowdsourcing is that you don’t really know if the information that you receive is based on the truth. The quality of the work can be difficult to judge.
So you can have all the knowledge of the world, if you are clear about what you expect. So why not ask people about their ideas and skills, the more the better.
https://dailycrowdsource.com/training/crowdsourcing/what-is-crowdsourcing
Hi Siobhan,
Thanks for your interesting post about crowdsourcing. With regard to making use of crowdfunding for designing a website logo I see the following problem: ‘The people who are interested in making logo’s will react and you will have a wide range of choice’. In my opinion a company only needs to focus on their target population and first make use of some market research. it is dangerous to rely on ideas of people outside of the target population because their opinion could differ a lot from the people the company tries to reach. I think that crowdfunding can be a useful tool for marketing but that it needs to be handled with care. As stated in your post, many people on the internet are fake. Before a company will rely on ideas, it needs more detailed about the people they rely on. In my opinion it is a better idea to reach people that are seen as interesting for the company and to rely on their ideas.
Thanks for your post about crowdsourcing. I think indeed that it brings great benefits to companies as they can work with anyone from everywhere. Especially the companies who engage their customers with their production ideas. I really like the crowdsourcing idea of Lays. They encouraged customers to create their favourite flavour of chips and other people were able to vote for the best one. For Lays, this was a real success as their sales grew with 8% in the next 3 months after the winner was announced. Not only did this contributed to the sales of Lays, they also engaged their customers and partnered up with them!