Crowdsourcing Ideas and Co-Creation refers to opening up the innovation process to get input and ideas from a wider range of people, instead of keeping it siloed within a company’s internal research and development teams. The benefits of this approach are tapping into the collective intelligence and diverse perspectives of a broader community, which can generate new ideas that internal teams may overlook. Two key methods for democratizing innovation are crowdsourcing and co-creation. Crowdsourcing uses the input from a large, diverse group of people, often through online platforms. Co-creation involves directly collaborating with customers and users to gather insights and feedback for developing new products and services.
This post will explore both Crowdsourcing Ideas and Co-Creation in more detail, providing examples and discussing best practices for leveraging these approaches to democratize product innovation.
Crowdsourcing for Innovation
Crowdsourcing refers to outsourcing tasks or challenges to a large, diverse group of people through an open call, often online. For innovation purposes, it usually involves soliciting ideas, designs, solutions or other contributions related to a specific problem or challenge a company faces. Successful examples of crowdsourced innovation include:
- Threadless – An online t-shirt company that crowdsources t-shirt designs from a community of designers. Users submit and vote on designs, and the most popular ones get produced and the designer receives a cash prize.
- Goldcorp Challenge – A mining company crowdsourced geological data and analysis from experts and non-experts to determine where to explore for gold on its property. The contest helped uncover over $3 billion in new gold deposits.
- Netflix Prize – Netflix offered $1 million to anyone who could improve its movie recommendation algorithm by 10%. The prize drew teams from around the world, resulting in a 10% improvement.
- IBM Innovation Jam – IBM hosted a 72-hour online brainstorming session with over 150,000 employees and clients to surface new business ideas. The jam generated 10 new businesses and operating units.
- LEGO Ideas – LEGO enthusiasts can submit ideas for new LEGO sets, get support through voting, and have their idea turned into a commercial product if it gets 10,000 votes.
There are several different crowdsourcing models:
- Knowledge discovery and management – Tapping into knowledge and expertise from a distributed group of people.
- Distributed human intelligence tasking – Getting a large group to complete many small tasks.
- Broadcast search – Having an open call for contributions to a specific problem.
- Peer-vetted creative production – Crowdsourcing designs, ideas or other creative content that gets reviewed and selected by the community.
Best practices for effective crowdsourcing include:
- Carefully framing the problem or challenge statement
- Offering incentives and rewards for participation
- Making the process easy and accessible to contribute
- Promoting transparency on how submissions will be evaluated
- Enabling interaction between participants
- Providing ways to filter and select the best ideas
Co-Creation with Customers and Users
Co-creation involves collaborating directly with customers and users to generate ideas, insights, and feedback for developing new products and services. Rather than keeping the innovation process siloed within a company, co-creation opens it up to input from end users. Successful examples of co-creation initiatives include:
- MyStarbucksIdea.com – Starbucks customers can post suggestions and ideas for new products, enhancements to the customer experience, and more. Top ideas get reviewed by Starbucks and sometimes implemented.
- Fiat Mio – Fiat allowed consumers to participate in designing a new car, submitting over 17,000 ideas on features, interior design, model name, and more. The end result was the Fiat 500.
- Threadless – Customers submit t-shirt designs and the Threadless community votes on them. The most popular designs get produced as new products.
- Mozilla Firefox User Testing – Mozilla engaged users to test Firefox prototypes and provide feedback during the development process, long before launch.
- LEGO Cuusoo – LEGO fans submit ideas for new LEGO sets. Other users support ideas they want to see made. If an idea gets 10,000 votes, LEGO reviews it and may turn it into a product.
The benefits of co-creation include:
- Increased customer engagement and loyalty
- Identifying hidden needs customers have
- Improving product-market fit
- Incorporating user preferences into design
- Customers feeling invested in the final outcome
Best practices for effective co-creation include:
- Identifying target users who will provide valuable input
- Providing effective tools for users to share their ideas and feedback
- Creating opportunities for ongoing dialogue and input during development
- Offering incentives such as rewards, recognition, early access, etc.
- Having processes to refine raw ideas into more developed solutions
- Closing the feedback loop by showing users how their input was used
Challenges of Open Innovation
While democratizing innovation has many benefits, there are also some potential challenges and risks to be aware of, including:
- Large volumes of ideas makes it difficult to systematically evaluate and filter contributions. Companies may need algorithms, machine learning, experts, and community voting to identify the best ideas.
- Crowdsourcing and co-creation build expectations among the community that their ideas will be used. Managing expectations through clear communication is important.
- Intellectual property issues can arise regarding who owns the ideas that get submitted. Companies need well-defined IP policies.
- It can be difficult to integrate crowdsourced innovations into existing processes. Companies need feedback loops and status updates to the community.
- Identifying the “right” problems and challenges that are well-suited for crowdsourcing is crucial, otherwise participation may be low.
Some ways to address these challenges include:
- Use algorithms, machine learning and experts to filter ideas and identify the most promising ones.
- Communicate evaluation criteria clearly to set expectations on what ideas will get selected.
- Have clear IP policies stating who owns submitted ideas.
- Provide quick feedback loops and status updates to keep the community engaged.
- Involve the community in refining raw ideas into more developed solutions.
- Carefully match the problem to the appropriate crowdsourcing method to ensure engagement.
Overall, while democratizing innovation has challenges, being aware of them and developing processes to address them can help companies benefit from the creativity of the crowd.
Conclusion
Democratizing innovation through crowdsourcing and co-creation can provide tremendous benefits, including tapping into diverse perspectives, fostering customer engagement, and identifying promising new ideas. However, it should not fully replace a company’s internal innovation processes. The crowdsourcing methods discussed can powerfully complement existing pipelines by bringing in fresh thinking and customer validation. There are still open questions around protecting IP, managing community expectations, and how to refine raw ideas into implementable solutions. Companies exploring open innovation need to develop thoughtful processes to address these issues.
Overall, democratizing innovation has shown much promise in giving companies a competitive edge. It enables them to identify “long-tail” ideas that their internal teams would likely miss. It brings customer voices directly into the ideation and design process. And it leverages the power of collective intelligence from both internal and external networks. As companies build their capabilities to tap into these collaborative opportunities, they can access a tremendous source of creativity and customer insight for developing the next generation of innovative products, services and business models.