Crowdsourcing and Product Design
CROWDSOURCING IN PRODUCT DESIGN FROM A MARKETING PERSPECTIVE
ABSTRACT
Crowdsourcing is the practice of outsourcing tasks including a form of compensation to a wide external group of people. It is a newly used term which refers to the process of obtaining services, ideas, or content by seeking contributions from a large group of people particularly from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. Multiple types of businesses nowadays are using crowdsourcing for a diverse range of tasks that they find can be better completed by members of a crowd rather than by their own employees. This paper examines this new terminology “crowdsourcing” and its relation to marketing in general. It presents as a primary focus the impact of crowdsourcing on product development, the different categories used for product design development including recent examples, and finally, an outline of the advantages and the limitations of crowdsourcing in this respect.
INTRODUCTION
The term ‘crowdsourcing’ was first coined in 2006 by journalist and author Jeff Howe, and his then editor at Wired Magazine, Mark Robinson [1]. Howe had begun noticing a trend amongst advertising agencies, television networks and newspapers which were leveraging content contributed by its users and applying the content inwardly to support parts of their businesses in significant and measurable ways. Howe has defined crowdsourcing as “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call” or, “the application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software” [1]. In his 2006 online blog posting, Howe goes on to explain that crowdsourcing can be either a form of peer-production where a task is undertaken collaboratively or, a task which is undertaken by individuals, provided that, in both cases, it is undertaken in an open call format and
ABSTRACT
Crowdsourcing is the practice of outsourcing tasks including a form of compensation to a wide external group of people. It is a newly used term which refers to the process of obtaining services, ideas, or content by seeking contributions from a large group of people particularly from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. Multiple types of businesses nowadays are using crowdsourcing for a diverse range of tasks that they find can be better completed by members of a crowd rather than by their own employees. This paper examines this new terminology “crowdsourcing” and its relation to marketing in general. It presents as a primary focus the impact of crowdsourcing on product development, the different categories used for product design development including recent examples, and finally, an outline of the advantages and the limitations of crowdsourcing in this respect.
INTRODUCTION
The term ‘crowdsourcing’ was first coined in 2006 by journalist and author Jeff Howe, and his then editor at Wired Magazine, Mark Robinson [1]. Howe had begun noticing a trend amongst advertising agencies, television networks and newspapers which were leveraging content contributed by its users and applying the content inwardly to support parts of their businesses in significant and measurable ways. Howe has defined crowdsourcing as “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call” or, “the application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software” [1]. In his 2006 online blog posting, Howe goes on to explain that crowdsourcing can be either a form of peer-production where a task is undertaken collaboratively or, a task which is undertaken by individuals, provided that, in both cases, it is undertaken in an open call format and
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