Understanding Crowdsourcing Processes

Berlin.
The next session at the Berlin Symposium is on crowdsourcing, involving two speakers (there’s also a lot of discussion, which I’m not blogging here.) We begin with Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva, who begins by introducing the range of related concepts which describe the broad field of crowdsourcing. The Net is diminishing transactional costs for communication, collaboration and coordination; this facilitates collaboration amongst disparate stakeholders and provides more opportunities for individuals to participate. As a result, innovation has been democratised – indeed, users are becoming ever more important as innovators.

Internet-enabled innovation can be used as an umbrella term for these processes; within this field, there are a number of specific formations, however: these include lead user innovation (users taking part in the value creation process on their own account, innovating largely in offline contexts); open innovation (initiated and coordinated by companies and other organisations, both in on- and offline contexts); user innovation communities (enabled and facilitated through Internet platforms and technologies, connecting users and companies); open source communities (as a specific, user-driven form of user innovation communities); and crowdsourcing (similar to user innovation communities spreading across users and companies, and online).

Such crowdsourcing constitutes companies taking specific functions once performed by employees and outsourcing them to an undefined and generally large network of people, through open calls for participation. What function is outsourced may differ from case to case, of course – crowdsourcing might include ‘idea games’ (asking the crowd for new ideas, some of which are then selected for further take-up); problem solving or ‘crowd casting’ (finding solutions to specific problems, through integrative and selective crowdsourcing); and prediction and information markets (extracting broader patterns from crowd activities through automatic integration, e.g. to predict the success or failure of cultural products).

Task that can be crowdsourced run the gamut from simple (easy to describe and understand, low barriers to participation, repetitive, selective, and poorly remunerated; value is created by the scale of crowd participation) through complex (requiring participant expertise and high involvement, selective, and well-remunerated; value is added by specific user expertise) to and creative tasks (creativity and uniqueness are required, and a diverse range of participants adds value). Players involved in these processes include a range of stakeholders, from users to companies.

The concrete process depends first on the decision to engage in crowdsourcing in the first place, moving from a call for participation through the submission process, an evaluation and awarding of submissions, and finally exploitation of generated ideas. These processes have been researched to a good extent so far, but mainly with a focus on the problems identified by companies themselves; they assume that crowds can be channelled and controlled, and tend to ignore the crowd’s own internal dynamics. Innovations resulting from this tend not to be radical, disruptive solutions – they generate answers to known problems, but not interesting new problems in their own right.

Such more complex problems can be addressed through other, emerging forms of crowdsourcing: for example, user-initiated crowdsourcing which does not depend on being kickstarted by a company. What is necessary here is simply the availability of platforms suitable to support crowdsourcing processes; CrowdTogether and LocalMotors are two examples of this. A different approach is crowd harnessing: collecting and curating existing crowd materials and through the process generating new value. This has been done for example in journalism, where user contributions on specific themes in social media sites have been collated to enrich journalistic coverage of events which are difficult for professional journalists to cover; the Arab Spring is an obvious recent example.

User-initiated crowdsourcing takes place independently from companies, therefore; it is not guided by a company’s known problems, but identifies and addresses its own issues. This may happen without companies being aware of it at all – or in the case of crowd harnessing, it is able to drive rather than follow an established corporate agenda.