This post is for the 24 hours of innovation. “My half time pep talk“.
Halfway 2009 is a great time to evaluate and look ahead. Thinking about the state of the art of crowdsourcing I can’t help but notice that this must me the time that crowdsourcing is getting less hip and more productive. Working at CreativeCrowds we get regular requests to speak about crowdsourcing. The people we talk to are changing. More boardrooms and more operational people are catching the vibe of engaging crowds in dialogue and co-creation, not just innovators and marketers.
While the incrowd is moving on to the next hype I feel that crowdsourcing is not yet productively put to action by organizations. Apart from some American successes, and some local cases, I must say I am disappointed. If you’d ask me two years ago, I thought we would be much further.
Gartner has been around. Their hype cycle is proven to be the normal curve of hypes reaching maturity and becoming productive. It’s the dip! So as we walk through the valley of the shadow of disillusionment, we can rest assured that we’ll get out and reach productivity soon! What follows now is “the slope of enlightenment”.
The slope of enlightenment is now. To give you some insight in what that Enlightenment means in Holland:
- Sara Lee is co-creating with the community of redesignme.
- The community of solvers ‘Battle of concepts‘ has gained momentum and puts the crowd to work for cold hard cash from large corporates.
- TomTom gaining competitive advantage with millions of map corrections from the crowd.
- A telecom provider developing games within a dutch gaming community (that’s a plug).
- Government uses Nings and Linkedin to engage people in their digital strategies.
- The list goes on…
Most of the things happening now are campaigns, not integrated in the company. But these projects will form the bases for productivity later on. In my vision this is a state in which companies have engagement of external people in their DNA, maybe even to the extent that it becomes hard to tell whether ‘external’ exists. My pep talk would be what you need before the last ‘col’ when cycling through the alps:
3 Responses to “Crowdsourcing’s Slope of Enlightenment”
- 1 Pingback on May 20th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
- 2 Pingback on Jun 28th, 2009 at 11:55 pm
Looking at your Change Curve for CrowdSourcing, which I assume must apply to all new technologies when their adoption is in effect a change in human behaviour, I can’t help worrying that the inflation of expectation was much greater than that illustrated.
The Wikipedia message of “90:9:1″ crowd involvement doesn’t seem to have percolated through, though in my experience it absolutely holds true, and this is resulting in ridiculous expectations in board rooms. Not helped by the perception of the ‘crowd’ as a free resource to be exploited intermittently.