Web's Largest listing of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding events
Web's Largest Directory of Sites2,349 crowdsourcing and crowdfunding sites
Crowdsourcing is becoming an integral part of how enterprises conduct their research, product development, execution and marketing. Over the past twenty years most companies have had at least one eye on making their processes more efficient.
We shouldn't get so caught up in the buzz around crowdsourcing that we overlook how to talk about it as a process that needs refining. So how do we go about making crowdsourcing more efficient, more productive or just plain better?
There is a way to do this – more than one way, no doubt.
First, we need to think of the parameters.
Crowdsourcing is clearly not going away. Any company that believes it can operate with a closed-walls philosophy is missing the point of social business. The crowd, or groups external to the firm, provide interesting, sometimes path-breaking, sometimes huge numbers of ideas, insights and solutions. Crowdsourcing is part of the future of making and selling things. No question.
Still, there are a couple of questions niggling away at the back of my mind. There are more than two but these two beg an answer.
The first is how do we improve crowdsourcing? We know it's better than relying solely on internal resources for a variety of tasks, from routine to innovatory, but if crowdsourcing is to become a fixed operational resource, a part of the furniture so to speak, then we need to know how to measure and improve the process. That's akin to saying how do we professionalise it.
The second question is where does it lead us to? CNN recently announced it will upgrade its iReport crowdsourced news services. The end result will be a social network for news, a community that simultaneously creates, distributes and consumes news. This makes perfect sense. We are already blurring the line between production, marketing and consumption but we need to think where this is headed in other segments of the market.
Founded in 2010, the industry website, Crowdsourcing.org, is a neutral organization dedicated solely to crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. As one of the most influential and credible authorities in the crowdsourcing space, Crowdsourcing.org is recognized worldwide for its intellectual capital, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding practice expertise and unbiased thought leadership.
