Summary It is a consumer-product company in Asia and they want to create a crowd-sourcing platform in which they can engage customers to generate ideas. Subsequently the company should be able to turn this input into ideas and innovations that drive business growth through this platform. The company has contacted a few solution providers and now they need to make a decision.

Description The company has also identified two clusters of service providers:

Cluster 1 - consists of crowdsourcing solution providers with the likes of Spigit, BrightIdea, Napkins Lab, Hype.de, Lithium and Salesforce; and

Cluster 2 consists of market research agencies or similar such as Chaordix, TNF Global and Flamingo. They are basically market/consumer research agencies that use digital technologies to recruit/engage focus group (also called crowd) to derive insights.

Both clusters call themselves crowdsourcing or crowd intelligence with slightly different focus (and similar pricing also) making it a bit confusing for the company to make a decision.