A colleague sent me a link today to a great article about crowdsourcing for innovation. "Crowdsourcing" is more or less a Web 2.0 kind of terminology- at least I've heard it used most by community companies building ROI arguments for social networks. To be sure about it, I checked the ultimate collaborative glossary.
"Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call... The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals."
We'll follow this notion and case studies/examples as we go forth with Community Casebook. Here's one interesting example from a shoe company, RYZ, whose CEO, Rob Langstaff, who used to lead Adidas, admits, according to the article, "that giving consumers control is humbling — and risky. But, he says, 'it's almost less risky to have most talented actors on your stage than to try to do it yourself.'"
Another expert in the article, MIT professor Eric von Hippel, an "expert in innovation management," indicates this is "the biggest paradigm shift in innovation since the Industrial Revolution... For a couple hundred years or so, manufacturers have been really imperfect at understanding people's needs. Now people get to decide what they want for themselves."
I supposed if the right technology is in place to allow for truly efficient and creative online crowdsourcing techniques, and the community also facilitates employee interactions to process suggestions and pass them through the internal network of the organization efficiently, from marketing to product development and beyond, the customers won't only decide what they want for themselves- they might also actually GET it! And therein, money- and loyal customers- will be made.
