BJ Allen is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas

What is Crowdsourcing?

Traditional outsourcing is common in business and consists of contracting out certain business tasks to another firm or agency. In the last decade, we have seen the rise of crowdsourcing, or outsourcing tasks to the crowd. The “crowd” – which consist of a group of external individual participants – submits concept ideas to firms, offers designs solutions, and solves business challenges. For example, P&G’s Connect + Develop website (https://www.pgconnectdevelop.com/) allows anyone to submit innovations to P&G for possible development. P&G gets the benefit of a vast number of unique and diverse ideas from thousands of crowd participants. However, just like most business trends that see their time in the sun, there seems to be a general decline in the excitement around traditional crowdsourcing. However, there are two new and interesting trends that are challenging the way we think about crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing for Execution

Most of the examples we hear about crowdsourcing revolve around crowdsourcing during the ideation phase of product development. During ideation, firms are soliciting a broad scope of ideas from the general public for brand new product concepts. But, what about businesses or entrepreneurs that already have an idea, but lack the engineering or design expertise to execute the idea? Can the crowd help in these situations? Traditional crowdsourcing is evolving to encompass a practice called design crowdsourcing “in phases following ideation, specifically, in the solicitation of actionable design solutions.”[1] On websites such as Eyeka and Crowdspring, business owners post creative briefs, and a crowd consisting of engineers, designers, and everyday users submit design and engineering specifications for possible designs for the product idea. Design crowdsourcing offers a vast amount of design expertise that increases functionality, design quality, and speed-to-market. Crowdsourcing now has the ability to help move concepts from ideas into existence.

Crowdsourcing + AI

An even newer trend being utilized in the world of emerging technology is the application of crowdsourcing combined with artificial intelligence. Both the crowd and AI have important capabilities, but they also have critical limitations. Firms such as Unanimous AI are learning that when the wisdom of the crowds is combined with AI, their synergies create better products, more accurate forecasts, and improved problem solving. Through a technique called artificial swarm intelligence – which gets its name from mimicking the process by which birds flock and bees swarm – crowds can better work together and learn dynamically from each other in real-time. Swarm technology improves the way that people interact, share information, and come to decisions democratically. This emerging technology has been used to predict political outcomes and Super Bowl winners, improve ad testing, and develop better products. The applications are endless and are just scratching the surface of what is possible.

The Best is Yet to Come

While traditional crowdsourcing is no longer the new, innovation darling that it once was, experts are finding emerging applications to utilize the crowd to effectively supplement firm resources and capabilities. Seeking the wisdom of the crowd is here to stay, and the best of crowdsourcing is yet to come.

[1] Allen, B. J., Deepa Chandrasekaran, and Suman Basuroy. "Design crowdsourcing: The impact on new product performance of sourcing design solutions from the “crowd”." Journal of Marketing 82, no. 2 (2018): 106-123.