'Co-creation' is the new crowdsourcing

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'Co-creation' is the new crowdsourcing | Best Awards | guardian.co.uk

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Agencies that fail to embrace 'co-creation' do so at their peril
John Williams guardian.co.uk
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Co-creation is the difference between people creating a great idea for you and people working with you to make a good idea great. Photograph: Seth Joel/Getty Images

Crowdsourcing in its crudest form – the worldwide "call-outs" for groups of people to carry out tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor – might be on its way out, but the creativity of the crowd is here to stay. Indeed, I'd argue that the agency that ignores crowdsourcing is in trouble. If you don't use it, your client will. Why? Simple: justifying why it is better to pay great people to do great work rather than crowdsource it for nothing is a hard sell. I believe that the key question for agencies is not "Should we use crowdsourcing?", but "Who will own it, client or agency?" And key to that is to stop thinking about crowdsourcing and start thinking about co-creation. Co-creation is the difference between people creating a great idea for you and people working with you to make a good idea great. It works because even the greatest creative rarely knows the complete answer – usually they know part of it or have a hunch. Someone somewhere probably knows another part of the solution, and so on, until a complete picture appears. By collaborating, we get to the solution quicker, and often with more elegance. I'm not talking about asking people to create your ideas for you. I am, however, talking about using co-creation as a planning tool to gain insight, to help refine concepts, turning small, bad ideas into big, great ones, using it to understand the real issues and

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1/19/2012 5:26 AM

'Co-creation' is the new crowdsourcing | Best Awards | guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/best-awards/co-creation-is-the-new-crowdsou...

needs of all stakeholders. And this is just the start. It's down to agencies to embrace co-creation and use it as a force for good, to raise it from being the strategy of the witless. To do that, you need to own the concept and show clients that crowdsourcing is a much more powerful tool in your hands than in theirs – or those of a competitive agency. John Williams is founding partner at WikiSolutions
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

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Summary
Crowdsourcing in its crudest form – the worldwide "call-outs" for groups of people to carry out tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor – might be on its way out, but the creativity of the crowd is here to stay.

Description
Co-creation is the difference between people creating a great idea for you and people working with you to make a good idea great. It works because even the greatest creative rarely knows the complete answer – usually they know part of it or have a hunch. Someone somewhere probably knows another part of the solution, and so on, until a complete picture appears. By collaborating, we get to the solution quicker, and often with more elegance.

Tags: Co-creation, Crowd creativity, Crowdsourcing

Posted by Pablo Braccini

Jan 18, 2012 10:00 pm GMT Viewed 2205 times

Author: John Williams Source

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