Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.
Therefore Crowd innovation entails the inclusion of many people in the innovation process, both internal or external, in order to generate and combine new ideas and solutions. The evolution of new information and communications technologies, facilitated opening innovation process to collective new ideas. Innovate cheaper does not mean less quality, since the crowd is more numerous therefore statistically more powerful. Crowd innovation is relevant in business contexts where customers can help generate ideas the company may not have thought of. It can help generate new ideas of:
- Products
- Services
- Branding
- Promotion
A couple of examples of well known brands using crowd innovation processes:
Coca-Cola, with the “Shaping a Better Future” challenge asks entrepreneurs to create improvement-ventures for the project-hubs of youth employment, education, environment and health.
Lego launched Cuusoo, an online platform that allows members of the public to post their ideas for potential Lego products. Read more about the topic in: crowdsourcing.org