Crowdsourcing - your way to success
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A presentation about the power of crowds and the massive potential they contain for businesses to learn and profit from. This will take you through the principles of crowdsourcing and co-creation, and will look first of all at the challenges we hear on a daily basis and try to explain why true crowd working negates many of these. It explains why we believe the crowd is a key business tool of the future, give some examples of where crowds are already delivering huge value and explain how this might be relevant for your businesses.
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Crowdsourcing - your way to success
- 1. Simon@wazoku.com @wazokuhq @mrsihill
- 2. Many > 1
- 7. “Under the right circumstances groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them”
- 8. What are the right circumstances?
- 10. 91% 65%
- 11. Do experts not matter in this new world?
- 12. Of course, experts matter….
- 13. The world is changing…
- 14. How can businesses benefit?
- 15. The ultimate suggestion box…
- 16. Using social to engage the world!
- 17. Challenges – Answers to your biggest questions
- 18. So what are your options? Internal idea management Customer survey system and feedback tools Competitions
- 19. Areas businesses can benefit Marketing Insight Employee engagement Customer engagement Brand Product Awareness Development
- 20. Simon@wazoku.com @mrsihill @wazokuhq
Editor's Notes
- WelcomeMy name is Simon Hill and I am the co-founder and CEO of the Idea Management firm Wazoku.Today I am going to talk to you about the power of crowds and the massive potential they contain for businesses to learn and profit fromI want to acknowledge some key influences in my thinking in this space, beyond our experiences with our customers and my many years in the industry, two key authors I have read and reference widely are James Surowiecki and Malcolm Gladwell, but there are many more very wise people and I will reference some of them during this presentation. Today I am going to take you through the principles of crowdsourcing and co-creation, I will look first of all at the challenges we hear on a daily basis and try to explain why true crowd working negates many of these. I will then explain why we believe the crowd is a key business tool of the future, give some examples of where crowds are already delivering huge value and explain how this might be relevant for your businesses. There will be time for questions at the end…..
- Some key terms – Crowd Crowdsourcing – distributed problem solving, outsourcing tasks to a network of peopleCo-creation – in this definition we build on crowd sourcing to engage the same community to help evolve and evaluate the ideas But we have experts, people who are paid good money due to expertise and tenure who know more and can make more informed opinions than a group or crowd….I want to challenge the established convention and put forward an alternative view – we should stop chasing the expert and ask the crowd
- I know that there will be huge skepticism and a belief that this is very idealistic so I will first look at some of the potential challengesYou don’t get true insight from a crowd, people simply follow other peopleYou do not see true innovation or free thinking but rather get groupthink Charles Mackay (a prominent C19th journalist wrote a famous article called the Madness of Crowds in which he declared – “Men think in herds,..”Nietsche declared “Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups”
- A C20th social psychological study looked to quantify this:First they put one person on a street cornet and had him stare at an empty sky for 60 seconds, only a tiny fraction of people passing by stopped to see what he was looking at, most just passed him byThey increased the number of people staring at nothing at all in the sky over time, at 15 people almost half of the people walking by stopped to see what they were looking at, increasing this further saw 80% of passers by stopSo….what can we learn from this….I want to throw out the phrase social proof and move on to another example….
- Nature warns us of this in a number of rare but naturally occurring phenomena such as…..The Circular mill of ants…a rare but natural phenomenon where ants that get separated from their colony follow a simply rule, follow the ant in front of you…..in most cases a few ants will break the circle causing it to disperse, but in some cases the ants may walk in never ending circles to their death….So what does this tell us….and how does this lend support to my opening assertion on the power and wisdom of crowds….
- All of this when brining it back to groups of people interacting, after all we are not ants and probably wouldn’t walk around aimlessly in a circle until we died (probably), but there are examples where….Homogenous groups are often victim of what psychologist Irving James called Groupthink, where the homogeneity fosters pressures towards conformity. It is the mode of thinking that happens when a decision making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives. The Bay of Pigs invasion and the Challenger space shuttle disaster are two classic examples of GroupthinkStructural faults that drive Groupthink:Insulation of the groupLack of impartial leadershipHomogeneity of members
- And so my claim:BUT: Haven’t we just shown this not to be true?No, what we have shown is that there are factors to be aware of and conditions that will enable groups to prosper, The key is the phrase “under the right circumstances……”
- Diversity of the group, we want a mix of opinions, types of people Independence – we want people to be free to think, free to express opinionDecentralisation – ideally we want some sense of decentralisation of the group, a break away from centralised hierarchies to more distributed groupsWorking together these factors are critically important as the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus and compromise. An intelligent group does not ask its members to modify its responses but rather uses mechanisms e.g. intelligent voting systems, to product collective judgments that represent in a sense what the collective group thinks….
- So lets think about that for a moment and ask what does the crowd really know…What does the crowd really know….A few light hearted examples before we look at some more examples specific to businessHow many jelly beans in a jar? Asked a group of students to guess – the average of the group of 56 people was 871, only one person in that group were closerInteresting, but this is people acting individually and smoothing an average rather than collectively and collaboratively, we will come on to that, but none the less this is interesting and is telling…..
- Another example is from Who Wants to be a Millionaire – Ask an expert i.e. phone a friend yields right answer 65% of the time, ask the audience is right 91% of the time…..
- Ok so what am I saying….One thing for certain it is not that individuals, experts or experience do not matter where the tools are introduced to engage with large groups of people. Rather that by having diverse groups including experts and other perspectives working together and operating independently and collaboratively the possibilities are incredible. Also, that by using the tools available to engage with crowds you can benefit One thing that I do believe, and research backs up, is that decision making expertise is not something that can be quantified, so putting power in the hands of a few experts to come up with and then decide on key strategic ideas is a high risk strategy. But…..
- They are just a part of the crowd, and often they are not the people in the crowd you might expect them to be….
- Experts are not as easy to identify, knowledge is very dispersed and therefore why wouldn’t we want to embrace all the tools we can to help access this knowledge, tap in to it, filter it, understand it, and help our “experts” to make informed decisions and share them back with the group?.....After all twenty something founders of social networks are on the cover of Time and are impacting the world in a way no-one could ever have forseen12 year olds are building leading iphone applications and inverting the class room by teaching their teachers how to build apps – such as Thomas Suarex – the Ted wunderkind who has founded his own company, built two leading iOS apps for the iphone and teaches a class to other kids at his school on app development – and he isnt even old enough to have a facebook account!!Our customers frequently see the best ideas coming from parts of the business they would never have expected and from individuals who they would never have tagged as experts or who would have been part of a traditional consultation and so these ideas would frequently have never surfaced. And its not just individuals - Hadoop – listed here – is a great example of crowd, open and distributed – keeping this very simple Hadoop is a software framework that supports data intensive distributed applications, essentially enabling applications to work with petrabytes of data (ie a lot of data!!). Yahoo is one of the biggest adopters using Hadoop extensively across its business and contributing all efforts back to the community.
- Well we have already seen some examples of this, we just discussed Yahoo and Hadoop, Google and Linux….But let’s look at a few more examples and look at some specific tools for engaging the two crowds closest and most accessible to all of you, your employees and your customers!!
- There are many turn key solutions on the web that can help individuals or businesses to engage with a crowd, whatever that crowd may be…..Online idea management systems help businesses to engage with their employees or wider community. They provide a sophisticated platform for idea generation and collaboration. They embrace mechanisms such as voting and commenting to help ideas advance, the best ones have workflow elements combined so that ideas can advance and feedback be shared. They embrace the key criteria of diversity, independence and decentralised working, but respect the core needs of businesses. Through these systems implemented properly businesses can learn a lot, gain access to ideas previously out of earshot, glean data about their ideas and innovation never previously available, and learn who the people within their crowd that are generating the value are. This is extremely powerful….
- Going beyond employees competitions leveraging social media can be utilised as a means to gathering a large volume of ideas and allowing the general crowd to interact with these very openly. For a business the reasons to undertake these challenges will vary, but we have significant experience in running these and would love to speak to you if this is something of potential intereste.g. CSR – travel company looking to engage community on green travele.g. marketing insight – media company looking to learn more from their readers on the topics they value the most and the content creators they value the most e.g. Events – startup competition running for this event, showcase for the businesses, for the event and has driven significant PR for both helping to drive awareness, sign ups to the event and the social community around it
- Unilver embraced open innovation working with technology partners, government bodies, scientific and public health institutions to develop a water purfying solution with the aim of protecting a billion lives and saving a million children in the developing worldNokia’s Ideas Project is an online community for everybody from around the world to exchange ideas and develop them around innovation and technology powered by NokiaCisco’s iPrize is an event where Cisco looks to the world for its next major business opportunity with a grand prize of $250,000 for the winning team as well as working with them to develop the ideaStarbucks ideas in action – this is a great example and one of the pioneers, not just step innovation but also incremental change – which is absolutely critical. Starbucks have had thousands of ideas submitted and many of them implemented, from new ways of recycling, to new instore promotions, new ranges (iced espresso!), all shared completely openly by phase. Every business can benefit from these tools, they are available off the web and easy to use and deploy.
- To name just a few – there are many more, but a few very relevant options include…..or find a tool that lets you do all three – come talk to us!