Web 2.0

I take the liberty to term co-creation and crowd-sourcing interchangeably.
- Co-creation best happens when the value that is generated is personalised to a much smaller entity (individual or customer) as much to the enterprise.
- Value creation is shifting from product-centric view to personalized-experience view
- The sources of innovation is thus broadened in the ladder of pervasiveness from individual to unit, division, enterprise, supply chain, consumer community and finally to the rest of the world

This requires a shift in the thought process of an enterprise think away from customer segment level and to focus on innovation at individual customers level

As a reply, I wanted to share my views on “Crowdsourcing” derived partly from the following books “James Suroweicky – Wisdom Of The Crowds”, “Chris Anderson – The Long Tail”, “We is Smarter Than Me”, “Polly La Barre – Mavericks At Work”, “The Tipping Point” and partly from my own experiences -

[1] Crowds work only if every participant acts as an Individual.

[2] There can be presence of niches but they are present only if you are reaching the end of the long tail & you have many choices to pick from.

[3] Crowds are good are VETTING CONTENT that CREATING IT. Although one of the books that I mentioned “We is Smarter than Me” is THE FIRST BOOK created by the Crowds, may be an exception. MIT, Pearson Education, Stanford etc. created a website where people became members & created the book. More details you can find in the book itself.

[4] All the points that you have mentioned as advantages apply to all the business models. Only the word “COMMUNITY” is read as “EMPLOYEE”, with community being more disorganized.

[5] Disadvantages written below have two interesting points.

If you talk about IP issues. I believe it shall BELONG to the CROWD. Like for an example, the book that I mentioned in [3] - “We is Smarter Than Me” donated all the revenue earned from publishing the book. The IP is shared. WHICH THE CROWD AGREED TO. So product/service models need to specifically mention what incentive the Crowd is going to get. [Read CROWD as MANY INDIVIDUALS participating for some cause.]

This is the reason why we have Creative Commons licence for most of the Crowdsourced content. Wikipedia is a big example of this.

IPs have been kept by companies like Eli Lily by stating the problem & only allowing the participants to view it if they are ready to NOT CLAIM the IP for their work. [UNFAIR THOUGH !!!]

Threat of competitors can actually be avoided by being PROACTIVE in copyrighting all the content that will be generated.

These were my eight and a half cents.

Your views are welcome.

~Thanks & Best Regards,
Rahul Breh

I would also like to add my 1&1/2 cent on this topic, but i want to look at a different industry. I think one of the most successful example of "crowdsourcing" is the collection of milk from thousands of villagers in a movement steered at the Kheda (or Kaira) District Co-operative Milk Producers Union Limited which led to the creation of the extremely successful organisation called AMUL (which by the way is an acronym of Anand Milk Union Limited). Long before the term was even conceptualised, one Tribhovandas Patel inspired by an extremely result oriented freedom fighter Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, used this movement as a tool for liberating the poor farmers from the clutches of the middlemen who controlled the collection, distribution and marketing of milk at the local Polson Dairy in Anand. Read the full story about AMUL here http://www.indiadairy.com/cont_highest_milkproducer_amulorigin.html and if you are really interested in what this organisation is doing today visit http://www.amul.com/index1.html.

Before people start getting edgy, let me clarify that my intention is not to be a PR person for AMUL nor even to be a Dairy historian, but to bring a different perspective on some of the terms that have become fashionable today.

Learnings from the AMUL story for crowdsourcing:
1) Presence of a strong motivation for the crowd to (source) collect together.
2) A visionary who knows how to get the crowd together and more importantly keep them together.
3) A tangible benefit for each member of the crowd. The benefit need not be big in itself, but should accrue for each member.
4) Smaller individual contributions but huge collective impact.

One can see most of these being applied to Wikipedia.

I rest my case.