Crowdsourcing, what it is, types, benefits and how you can use it.

What is Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is extremely powerful in accessing Intelligence, talent and cumulative power of many for your project or problem

The word Crowdsourcing originates from A mixture of “crowd” and “outsourcing,” and was coined in 2006.

It can be said that it is a way of using crowds as a source for various things such as getting tasks done or gathering Ideas.

I believe Crowdsourcing has a lot of potential for businesses.

Innovators and workers to get together with a tribe of people with similar interests or skills to collaborate, contribute and earn on big and small projects.

Crowd, Human, Silhouettes, Personal, Group Of People

What can be done using Crowdsourcing?

A lot of tasks can be presented to the public by launching Design Competitions, Posting Problems and requesting for Ideas. Giving your App for testing.

1. Crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding has been extremely successful in the past 10 years and has raised millions and even billions for their Innovators and Project Owners. .

EOS is a blockchain operating system has crowdfunded $4 billion. (Highest Crowd funded projects on wikipedia)

All kinds of projects various fields including Art, Design and Tech, Gaming, Food & Craft and Music are using Crowdfunding to kick Start their Project.

2. Microtasking

Getting data that would otherwise be time-consuming to process or impossible to access. Getting Micro Tasks done such as Tagging, Transcribing, Translating, classifying.

Examples of Micro-tasking

Tagging satellite/aerial imagery to accelerate disaster damage assessments
Identifying deforestation/forest degradation from Landsat satellite imagery
Crowdsource by Google is a project that presents microtasks for Image Caption, Handwriting Identification, Image Labeling.

3. Design Crowdsourcing.

Holding a Crowdsourced Competition to get your logo or web design completed is being more effective as you can get fresh ideas in lowest price possible from around the globe.

And the best part is you don’t pay for the designs you do not approve but you get more choices to choose from.

here are a few things you can ge Done.

Graphic Crowdsourcing.

Logo Design.
Web and App Design. .
Print Design.
- Letterhead Design.
- Envelope Design
- Business Cards Design
- Stationery Design
- Art & Illustrations.

5. Crowdsourcing Innovation

When it comes to getting the brightest and smartest Ideas even Nasa considers and uses Crowdsourcing to solve problems.

CrowdSource Innovation is being used by all sorts of companies.

Success Stories of Crowdsourcing

Did you know Crowdsourced

Is Wikipedia Crowdsourced?

Yes, Wikipedia can probably be said to be the father of internet crowdsourcing.

Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 55 million articles written by a community of volunteer editors. It attracting 1.7 billion unique visitors per month

NASA – NASA Solve – Crowdsourcing Success for Innovation & Problem solving.

NASA Solve lists opportunities available to the general public to contribute to solving tough problems related to NASA’s mission.

Through challenges, prize competitions, and crowdsourcing activities.

Anyone from the public who wants to get involved in helping develop meaningful solutions for real world problems related to NASA’s mission can participate.

Contributing with skills time and passion they uniquely have.

A few of Nasa Solve Accomplishments using Crowdsourcing.

$1.3 million dollars Awarded to a team for a fuel efficient aircraft,
A Team won $500,000 for building a regolith collecting robot
A pair of men collected a combined $300,000 for their astronaut glove prototypes.

LEGO Ideas success using Crowdsourcing

Lego Ideas allows users to submit ideas for Lego products to be turned into potential sets available commercially

With the original designer receiving 1% of the royalties.

LEGO Ideas has reduced the time to market for new LEGO kits from 2 years to 6 months.

In just over 5 years, 23 new LEGO kits have been developed from the Ideas community. All were best sellers, with 90% selling out in their first release.

EOS.IO Raised $4,100,000,000 through Crowdfunding.

EOS.IO is a blockchain protocol based on the cryptocurrency EOS.

The smart contract platform claims to eliminate transaction fees.
Conduct millions of transactions per second.

The Benefits of CrowdSourcing

Crowdsourcing has many benefits over the traditional sourcing methods.

When used in the right way can be very powerful and can deliver with speed.

here are some of the benefits.

Offers Unexpected Solution to Difficult Problems.

Organization might face a Creative Block or might not have the necessary skill or perspective for solving certain problem.

But crowdsourcing resolves these issues as it has Greater diversity of thinking wider pool of experts from diverse knowledge backgrounds at their disposal.

Therefore even Nasa is using crowdsourcing when they have access to the best of expertise hired.

Available 24X7, people are able to work on your project from anyplace, anytime.

With Crowdsourcing you can save time as people can work from all around the Globe.

They can do more tasks than with resources limited to 9 hours of office time.

However Crowdsourcing is typically done through Web Platforms hence it is more accessible to people.

Scalable, hence you can do more with Multiple Projects.

When you utilize Crowdsourcing, you are not limited because your workforce is occupied.

But you are liberated to do more you can employ thousands of team at demand.

True Feedback

Employees can be biased or can adopt a certain pattern of thinking which might not deliver desire results.

Also Employees might withhold solutions that would increase their own workload.

But using Crowdsourcing for possible solutions can can give a totally new perspective that may solve your problem better.

So You can expect honest feedback that will genuinely help you improve as a company.

Lower Overhead.

When we use Web based crowdsourcing we do not need to provide office space, laptops, office supplies and other tangible needs.

So as a result you save a lot of financial resources which can be used into other areas.

Significantly Lower cost.

Crowdsourcing projects can cost you much lower then performing the same task utilizing company resources.

When you are running a Competition you only have to pay the team or Individual that wins and fits your requirement.

You also can find and identify highly skilled resources and use them later for other projects.