How Big Can Crowdsourcing Get? By all accounts, the consumer posted Doritos commercial that showed through the Super Bowl was popular. 20) and Frito Lay saved thousands in production costs. Increasingly more companies nowadays are turning to crowdsourcing ways to help solve business problems by soliciting solutions from the general people. 300M into crowdsourcing startups in 2011 as the industry is expected to explode in the approaching years.
But what size can it get? Will it be another outsourcing sensation that will revolutionize existing corporate and business structures? Or does it merely be considered a specific niche market offering found in more humble contexts? While the term crowdsourcing has been around since a Wired article in 2006 on the disruption of the professional photography industry, it seems to be ripe for growth in the current business landscape.
With prolonged unemployment as the new normal, the workforce has become more versatile and open to part-time, one-off assignments. Many (like AtmaBus 🙂 are willing to volunteer their skills for virtually nothing at all to gain publicity. At the same time, companies realize that it is too expensive and impractical to hire sufficient talent for every requirement.
With the ease of internet distribution, companies can take advantage of the readily available cheap work force. They are able to get a broad reach, diverse input, and pay nothing for it virtually. No dependence on expensive marketing and engineering departments, right? Crowdsourcing hasn’t deeply penetrated the business world at this time. Certainly niche categories like funding and sites like crowdflower have gained vapor.
- Meaning and objectives of employee training
- Stock with high profits or sales
- System Design and Development
- The Top 10 Great things about Building Business Relationships. (1997). CoachVille
1M a few years ago to a team that built a better recommendation algorithm. More often than not, however, companies so far never have significantly used group approaches for substantive tasks. Many, for me, are employing it more for marketing problem resolving then. The Doritos commercial reached its marketplace successfully; any cost benefits was a byproduct.
My fave Sam Adams is soliciting recipes to debut a new beverage at SxSW. Gap used it to check market a new logo on FB. A couple of hundreds of contest/user insight tasks out there. Do these businesses care more about the outcome or creating a buzz for their new product?
Its most likely the latter, as I believe the expense of these tasks are striking marketing budgets as opposed to production ones. Also, as I had written about the finish of all things free online, user-generated input will slowly increase in price much like traditional outsourcing has. As crowdsourcing moves out of early adoption, the intersection of demand and supply can be more meaningful.