Some great comments were posted to my article on Crowd Innovation over on RealInnovation where it was cross-posted. I’ll share them and comment further on them here. You can read the comments in their entirety here.
It is always a pleasure to chat with Ellen Domb, and her comments are always very insightful. She responds saying, “Using the accumulated knowledge of human history is not the same as asking a crowd what to do--considerable skill (subject matter expertise, how to organize information, TRIZ structures) is needed to get anything useful.”
I couldn’t agree more. The crowd may be able to provide grist for the mill, but there is a lot of work required to refine that raw material and derive something of value. There are better, faster ways to get there.
Navneet Bhushan makes some good observations. He correctly identifies that open-source manufacuting (think Linux) is different from the concept of crowd-sourced innovation. Navneet continues on to say that, “… I believe hierarchies had their day - it is the melting structures towards loosely coupled networks that are going to play bigger role then they had - the age of Co-Creation is here - in a disruptive way ...”
True enough, Navneet. But I don’t see sufficient examples to support crowdsourcing for innovation as an effective path for sustainable innovation practice. To meet this metric, we will need to see real evidence that the successes are more than mere chance would produce. Co-creation should definitely be leveraged, but in so doing companies can achieve strong, reliable results by managing their networks for greater relevance and alignment.
Spacecadet suggests that crowdsourcing has been around for a long time and that, “…it cannot be denied that there are many projects better done through this method at comparatively little cost.”
Well, Spacecadet… That all depends on what you call crowdsourcing. Today’s meaning of crowdsourcing for innovation really refers to a model of concept sourcing that was simply not possible until recently. Hence, your statement that it has been around since the 1800’s doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Advances in technology have created a previously unknown capacity to connect with extremely broad communities and aggregate input. It is this scale of connection that purportedly will yield valuable results because the scale and bread of community is expected to cast a wide enough net to capture the right, high-value concepts. Unfortunately, there is no proof that this fundamental assertion has any credibility. Only time will tell.
Anil Rathi expressed some very strong opinions on the subject calling some of my statements unfounded. It is curious to note that Anil goes on to say:
“I will say your comment that "the larger the crowd the messier the haystack" is IMHO an accurate statement. If crowdsourcing is a giant free for all for ideas with little to no management, no structure, no processes, no incentives, etc. then a company is bound to get a bunch of 'raw' ideas that are may have taken a few minutes or seconds for members of the crowd to generate (ie. Dell's IdeaStorm). "Raw" ideas are nothing more than the content posted on a blog, left for interpretation by the reader. Who wants to sift through a bunch of raw ideas?”
Gee whiz, Anil. I think you have just made my point quite eloquently!
Anil goes on to state that better results are achieve by carefully selecting a targeted participant group and managing the process of concept gathering very carefully. He is exactly correct. There a number of practices and techniques for harnessing the knowledge and insights of target groups that yield great insight. Companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Frito-Lay have proven records of success with the application of these methods. However, these methods are not crowdsourcing.
What do you think?
Hi James
I have posted my reactions to your reactions to our reactions to crowd innovation :)
at my blog
http://innovationcrafting.blogspot.com/2007/12/james-todhunter-crowd-innovation.html
Posted by: Navneet Bhushan | December 20, 2007 at 10:19 PM