The Growing Value in that Crowd- Encourage the voices out

Why use crowdsourcing? Well the goal for me is to engage and move the crowd towards a new direction, by encouraging out individual thinking and discovery, searching for combining these contributions; ones that lead to novel, new answers that move a challenge forward into a solution, one that has improved innovating value over the existing. The community is encouraged to form, lead and build, taking ideas and thinking onto discovery journeys, seeking out and building on each other’s contributions. The overriding need is to release the forces within the crowd, by seeking out and gaining their engagement and connection as something ‘they’ believe they can contribute into; as here lies the discovery of many, combining and ‘feeding off’ of each other, to change the existing into the preferred by their insights and contributions. Crowdsourcing is allowing diverse communities to come together. Crowdsourcing is allowing broader groups of people to come together, to gather around a challenge or problem and through the collective diversity of insights, experience or suggestions, offer solutions Without this collective wisdom it often would not be as possible to discover or piece together radically different solutions or crack complex problems or determine new pathways Knowing what we are getting into becomes critical to want to jump in and take part Designing the challenge becomes critical. We need to always know or believe it is crowd-worthy. It is these crowd-worthy challenges which trigger us into action. It needs a significant thinking through if you want to delve into a real challenge; it can equally be a challenge that is simply one to ‘put out there’ to gather and illicit ‘quick’ opinions. For me, Crowdsourcing can be beneficial in the following ways: 1. It can deliver an awareness and buzz that provides positive publicity and value to you. 2. It can qualify and test emerging ideas and the thinking through early enough to gain significant improvements or recognition that they lack scale appeal. 3. It can simply be a primary source of engagement with the public and stakeholders and influencers to receive invaluable feedback and confidence of message, direction, contribution and value. 4. It ‘puts out there’ crowd-based challenges that bring to the surface fresh insights and raises alternatives to adopting and adapting within your innovation activity. 5. It can ‘solve’ problems from those normal non-traditional sources that it would be hard to reach and engage without a higher level of commitment. 6. You can keep crowdsourcing specifically for worthy causes that build social responsibility identification and contribution. 7. Make it a core part of your innovation where you are seeking out breakthrough new innovations that can radically challenge and alter existing thinking. 8. You can use it for launching and evaluating a product / service / idea or news-worthy event. 9. It can help drive overall spend efficiencies and saving costs through obtaining feedback and suggestions on improvements of service and seeking out comparable approaches the crowd is more likely to be aware of. 10. It allows participates to engage, seek dialogue and have conversations that build a sense of identity and common purpose. In Summary “Crowdsourcing is probing the experience economy, wanting to understand authenticity, explore individual views, pushing to form new connections, curate and filter lots of different stuff. Much of what we are doing is blurring and crowdsourcing is attempting to pick this apart to help”.