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Crowdsourcing


What is crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is the practice of utilizing the wisdom of a group of people for a common goal. Crowdsourcing can be extremely powerful when used in the right place at the right time. "Though crowdsourcing has been around for a long time, it became popular around the same time as the emergence of commerce, social media, and the smartphone culture" (White, J. 2019). Increased connectivity between people has been the biggest contributor to the growing interest.

How does crowdsourcing work?

"In order to crowdsource effectively, a business must break a larger project into individual micro-tasks. Workers then come together to tackle these micro-tasks in small pieces to expedite the process" (White, J. 2019). This collaborative brainstorming enables thousands of people to contribute their thoughts into a single task. Crowdsourcing uses the Internet task market to connect workers to a job. It enables those workers to take the kinds of jobs they like and complete those jobs when and where they want. Employers can find the kinds of workers they need and pay for only the amount of work they need. 

What are the benefits of crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing has a number of benefits that businesses can leverage to their advantage. "It provides an easy solution for scaling out any workforce by farming out small portions of a project that can be completed by remote workers at any given time or place" (White, J. 2019). Crowdsourcing also provides the ability to access people who have the skill sets that are unavailable within the company. Additionally, crowdsourcing allows businesses to perform tasks more quickly than a single employee and reduces operational costs.

What are some examples of crowdsourcing?

Waze - One of the first examples of crowdsourcing I thought of is the app Waze. The app allows users to report traffic jams and automatically gives directions for the best route to take. Waze crowdsources information by measuring drivers speed to determine traffic jams and by asking users to report road closures.

Lego - Lego allows users to design new products and test the demand. Any user can submit a design that other users can vote on. The idea with the most votes gets moved into production.

Lays - The "Do Us a Flavor" crowdsourcing campaign encouraged customers to create their own flavor of chip and vote on their favorite ones. The winner then went into production.

Netflix - The online video rental service uses crowdsourcing to improve the software algorithms used to offer customer video recommendations.

Resource:

White, J. (2019, July 23). What Is Crowdsourcing and How Does It Work? Definition and Example. TheStreet. https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/education/what-is-crowdsourcing-15026002.


Comments

  1. JFoxxJune 3, 2020 at 7:43 AM

    Leah, thanks for your summary of crowd sourcing! I really enjoyed that you listed several very common ways that crowd sourcing has been used, I am familiar with all of these but had not put them in the context of crowd sourcing. It is really interesting to see how it has been used and it makes me excited to think about all of the innovative ways we can solve problems using crowd sourcing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. LeahJune 3, 2020 at 10:10 AM

      You're welcome! There are so many different innovative ways crowdsourcing can be used.

      Delete

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