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  Best
Practices in Crowdsourcing
Leveraging the Wisdom of
Crowds for Your Business
By Matthew D. Lees, Senior Contributing Editor, January 28, 2010
NETTING
IT OUT
Why Is
This Important to Customers?
Crowdsourcing
gives customers the opportunity to play an important role in shaping the
things they care about and that will impact them in (1) their use of your
products and services and (2) the way they do business with you.
Why Is This Important to Your Company?
Being competitive
in today’s light-speed world means being efficient, flexible, and responsive
to customer needs and market demands. Crowdsourcing offers a customer-centric
approach to tapping into the collective experience, knowledge, creativity,
and skills of your customers as they help you be more innovative and effective.
INTRODUCTION
What
Is Crowdsourcing?
Who Coined
the Term and Why? James Surowieki’s impressively titled
2004 book, “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the
Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and
Nations,” wasn’t the first book on this topic, but it did help
root the wisdom of crowds concept in the business landscape. A few years
later, in an article for Wired Magazine, Jeff Howe streamlined “wisdom
of crowds” into the participle “crowdsourcing” and is
credited with that word’s provenance.
What
Does It Mean? Crowdsourcing is getting input—ideas, substantive
content, or other things—from a wide swath of people. It’s
a way for a small group to get input from a much larger group. But getting
the input itself is just part of what crowdsourcing brings to the table;
inherent in the concept is a way for these people to also give their perspective
on the merit of those ideas and that content. It therefore takes the old
suggestion box concept one step further.
This report continues...
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