Papers - Boudreau - Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner

28 important questions on Papers - Boudreau - Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner

What is the main reason companies resist crowds for open innovation?

Managers don't clearly understand what kinds of problems a crowd really can handle better and how to manage the process

What are the fundamental differences between crowd-powered problem solving and traditional organisational models?

Crowd is loose and decentralised, companies are relatively well coordinated environments.
Crowd is diverse and can operate at larger scale.
Crowds offer incentives that companies find difficult to match

What are some incentives that companies find difficult to match but what crowds offer?

Intrinsic motivation, such as desire to learn.
The opportunity to burnish one's reputation among a large community of peers
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When do contest crowdsourcing initiatives work best?

When it is not obvious what combination of skills or technical approach will lead to the best solution for a problem.
They are most useful for problems that would benefit from experimentation and multiple solutions

When can contest crowdsourcing be also usefull?

In solving design problems, in which creativity and subjectivity influence the evaluation of solutions

What are some management challenges in running a crowdsourcing contest?

  1. Identifying a problem important enough to warrant dedicated experimentation
  2. Making the problem immediately understandable to a large number of outside solvers
  3. Making it abstract enough to avoid revealing company-specific details
  4. It must be structured to yield solutions the organisation can feasibly implement

How must one make a contest appealing?

It must be promoted in such a way, with prizes and opportunities to increase stature among one's peers.
The sponsor must devise and commit to a scoring system.
Explicit contractual terms and technical specifications must be created to ensure the proper treatment of intellectual property

What is one of the main differences between crowdsourcing contests and crowd collaborative communities?

Contest separate contributions and maximize diverse experiments, communities are organized to marshal the outputs of multiple contributors and aggregate them into a coherent and value creating whole.

What is a commonality between a company and collaborative communities?

Communities, like companies, must first assess what should be included in the final aggregation and then accomplish that through a combination of technology and process

What type of innovation do the crowd complementors create?

A market for goods or services to be built on your core product or technology,  transforming that product into a platform that generates complementary innovations

What is an example of an innovation built around the crowd complementor type of crowdsourcing?

Itunes, organised around the core products of Apple. Pools of geographically distributed developers create an array of complementary innovations, such as software apps and user generated podcasts

What is one of the main differences between contests or communities, and complementors?

Complementors provide solutions to many different problems rather than just one

What is the first challenge to using the crowd as a complementor?

Providing access to the functions and information in the core product

What is the one of the main differences between contest crowdsourcing and crowd labor markets?

Contest offer crowds rewards for coming up with solutions to specific problems, labor markets match buyers and sellers of services and employ conventional contracting for services rendered.

What is seen as critical to the success of flexible spot markets used in crowd labor markets?

The growing sophistication of their technological infrastructure and platform design, allowing transactions to be effectively governed

What are some major benefits of crowd labor markets as opposed to regular in company organisation?

  • Highly flexible
  • On demand matching of skills to tasks
  • Large scale
  • Radical reduction in start-up and transaction costs

What might be the biggest concern or challenge when exploiting spot labor markets?

Identifying which task to farm out and who within your organisation should manage them

What is the main purpose of "Crowd Contest" way of crowdsourcing?

Generating high-value solutions to complex or novel problems through large scale and diverse independent experimentation

What is the main purpose of "Collaborative Communities" crowdsourcing?

Aggregating a large number of diverse contributions into a value-creating whole

What is the main purpose of "Complementors" type of crowdsourcing?

Encouraging innovative solutions to users' many different problems with your core products

What is the main purpose of "Labor Markets" way of crowdsourcing?

Efficiently and flexibly matching talent to discrete tasks

What are the main challenges of "Crowd Contest" crowdsouring?

The problem must be generalized and stripped of company specific details

What are the main challenges of "Collaborative Communities" type of crowdsourcing?

The crowd lacks the shared culture and cohesiveness of a company, making it harder to control; intellectual property can't be protected

What are the main challenges of "Complementors" type of crowdsourcing?

It can be technologically daunting to provide access to the functions and information in the core product while protecting your assets

What is the best use case for "Crowd Contest" crowdsourcing?

  • Highly challenging technical, analytical, and scientific problems
    design
  • design problems
  • creative aesthetic projects 

What is the best use case for "Collaborative Communities" type of crowdsourcing?

  • Customer support communities
  • wikis
  • open-collaboration projects for information and software products with complementary assets inside the firm
  • FAQs  

What is the best use case for "Complementors" type of crowdsourcing?

  • Open operational, product, or marketing data initiatives
  • content mashups
  • apps 

What is the best use case for "Labor Markets" type of crowdsourcing?

  • Well-established categories of work that can be clearly described and evaluated
  • Human computation
  • Repeated tasks

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