Most forward thinking
companies have resorted to a new medium for business expansion and
product development apart from marketing and branding activities also
known as Crowdsourcing. The term was initially created by Jeff Howe
of Wired magazine back in 2006 and defined this to be the phenomenon
of sending out various tasks to the public at large to get the most
productive solution in return.
Simply
put, crowdsourcing is a new face of idea
management
for
companies. The management idea
is useful because it does not rely on a single person or a specified
team for the success of a product development campaign or developing
a social welfare plan. Furthermore the diverse ideas that it
generates provides solutions for unresolved problems as well as ideas
for a better future. Open innovation and crowdsourcing is being used
across all industry verticals today namely engineering, science and
technology, advertising, automobile, banking, entertainment and many
more.
Netflix
Prize, an online DVD-rental service announced an open innovation
competition for attaining the best collaborative filtering algorithm
that will predict user ratings for films, depending on previous
ratings. This competition was launched by Netflix and got completed
back in September 2009. The prize amount was $1,000,000 which was
reserved for the entry that reveals Netflix's own algorithm for
predicting ratings by 10%. The company offered a training data set of
over 100 million ratings that almost 480,000 users gave to nearly
18,000 movies that in turn happened to be one of the largest
real-life data sets available for research. The forum managed by
Netflix has witnessed lively discussions and contributed immensely to
the success of this competition. This open innovation exercise
reveals that an essential aspect of crowdsourcing is that the top
teams are not only including academic researchers, but also laymen
with no prior experience in collaborative filtering.
Another
crowdsourcing project that highlights that each and every individual
has a unique suggestion to offer was made by the National Library of
Australia. The library came up with Australian Historic Newspapers
that encouraged the public to enhance, correct the electronically
translated text of old newspapers. This service was made available on
August 2008, and by March 2010 more than 12 million lines of the text
have been enhanced by the public. This has been the first library
project globally through crowdsourcing that helped libraries and
archives enhance the digital resources.
The
main objective of open innovation and crowdsourcing is to capture
ideas that make a difference and come up with unique ideas and
services that would benefit to all. This apart, crowdsourcing
reinforces the fact that every individual is capable of revolutionary
thinking and fosters a culture of knowledge sharing.
Read More About: Idea Management Software
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