Story: Crowdsourcing is only as good as the crowd.  Presenters at the World Research Group‘s Innovation Cubed Summit described several methods that they use to engage people for internal innovation efforts.  In particular, they talked about getting participation beyond just idea submission.

Although some innovation contests have an easy-to-score objective measure of success (such as NetFlix’s rating algorithm contest or the get-to-space Ansari X PRIZE), most participatory innovation efforts cast a wider net and have more open-ended, subjective measures of performance.  That means people need to evaluate all the submissions to find the best ones.  These broad innovation contests involve more than just submitting a great idea (the proverbial 1% inspiration).  The effort also requires the 99% perspiration to sort through hundreds or thousands of candidate ideas, score those ideas, and refine the ideas.  Motorola, for example, received 17,000 ideas in their system.  How can companies evaluate ideas?

The solution is to recruit and reward a crowd that helps curate, moderate, vote, and refine ideas even if those participants aren’t idea submitters. Kraft and PepsiCo, for example, emphasized ease-of-use in their efforts at increasing participation.  They make it very simple and intuitive to join the innovation effort, submit ideas, vote, comment, and participate in the effort.  The companies avoid the temptation of asking too many questions and putting approvals barriers on participation.

Real-time recognition also spurs interest and activity.   Both PepsiCo and Motorola post a leaderboard of “Who’s Hot” on their innovation portals.  The up-to-date ranking list enables competitive participants to see their standing at any time.  Timely updates to standings keep people more engaged than if the company ran a “submit-by-the-deadline-and-you won’t-hear-anything-for-a-month” black hole contest.  Game mechanics with well-defined ways of earning points or game currency help increase activity.

Finally, offer a sliding scale of rewards for valuable participation, not just idea submission.  Although some contests focus on rewarding a single big winner with the best idea, several of the companies at the summit sought ways to reward more of the participants in the system.  For example, PepsiCo offers participatory awards for reaching certain point totals.  Both Motorola and PepsiCo had side-contests for high levels of participation, such as “Top Voter” or “Top Point-Getter” in addition to awards for the best ideas.  Approximately 10% of PepsiCo’s 3000 participants reached some sort of award level for their participation in the open innovation efforts.

Action

• Minimize the labor, barriers, or hassles for participation in innovation efforts
• Create a transparent process with clearly-defined expectations and rewards for participation as well as idea submission
• Provide a sliding scale of rewards for all kinds of participation on the innovation process, not just one big prize for one big idea.

For further information: The next World Research Group Open Innovation Summit will be held August 10-12, 2011 in Chicago, IL.

Story: One month after launching in Kenya, startup Txteagle Inc became one of the country’s largest employers with a workforce of 10,000 Kenyans. Let’s look at what Txteagle does and the implications for managers and employees worldwide.
In 2008, former MIT Research Scientist Nathan Eagle founded Txteagle (now Jana Mobile), with the idea of marrying crowdsourcing to cellphones.  Txteagle deconstructs work into microtasks that can be performed on any simple mobile phone through texting. Txteagle distributes the microtasks to thousands of workers (currently primarily in Africa) who complete them and get paid via the mobile phone either in airtime minutes or in cash through the M-Pesa service.
“Txteagle is a commercial corporation that enables people to earn small amounts of money on their mobile phones by completing simple tasks for our corporate clients,” says Eagle.
The types of tasks Txteagle’s African workers have done are:
* enter details of local road signs for creating satellite navigation systems
* translate mobile-phone menu functions into the 62 African dialects (for Nokia)
* collect address data for business directories
* fill out surveys for international agencies
Txteagle seems similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, except that workers only need a simple mobile phone – no computer or Internet access is needed. TxtEagle now has partnerships with 220 mobile operators in more than 80 countries.  This expands Txteagle’s reach to 2.1 billion cellphone users in sub-Saharan Africa, Brazil and India, who can all participate as workers. Currently, the firm earns revenues 49 countries.
At first glance, managing 10,000+ workers — not to mention controlling quality — seems daunting. Txteagle solves the problem through algorithms.  “Instead of using managerial staff to oversee accuracy and quality, we use math,” Eagle says. Txteagle’s algorithms infer the correct answer by asking more than one person, Eagle said.  Txteagle also tracks each worker’s accuracy and rewards the best workers. “If they get a lot of right answers in a row, we pay them more for each answer,” Eagle says.

Win/win/win/win for everyone:
For companies in the developed world:
* lowers labor costs through access to a worldwide workforce
* access real-time local expertise in language, business, markets, and conditions
For developed-world workers
* make extra money during downtime
* flextime work
For developing-world workers
* access to work despite local economic conditions
* lets women work remotely
Entrepreneurs everywhere have to opportunity to design work in a new way and not need employees on the payroll in order to get work done.

Action

• Think about the information that ordinary people in foreign markets could collect for your business, such as market  conditions, surveys, local business prospects
• Consider overcoming language hurdles that keep your products from succeeding in diverse economies
• Think about tasks anyone in the world might do during a few minutes to spare
• Imagine how 2.1 billion people could work for you one text at a time

Sources:

Txteagle (now Jana Mobile)

Jessica Vaughn, “Q&A: Nathan Eagle, founder of txteagle,” JWT Intelligence  March 3, 2010 http://www.jwtintelligence.com/2010/03/qa-nathan-eagle-founder-of-txteagle/

Robert Bain, “The power of text in the developing world,”  20 January 2011 http://www.research-live.com/features/the-power-of-text-in-the-developing-world/4004395.article

Kate Greene, “Crowd-Sourcing the World,” MIT Tech Review, Jan 21, 2009 http://www.technologyreview.com/business/21983/

Nathan Eagle presentation at TedxBoulder, August 7, 2010

Story:

In the beginning, companies used crowdsourcing as part of their open innovation efforts to get new ideas from lead users, customers, and the world at large.  But now, entrepreneurial companies such as Trada and CloudCrowd are moving beyond one-off design efforts and contests (e.g., the Netflix Prize) to encompass routine everyday business processes.  As CloudCrowd CEO Alex Edelstein sees it, “similar to the way Henry Ford’s early assembly lines created a new, more efficient way to complete work, we’ve designed an online process that delivers accurate finished work for even complex projects at a significant savings.”  Let’s look at these two examples.

First, Trada Inc., which recently emerged from stealth mode private beta, offers crowds of pay-per-click experts who create paid-search marketing campaigns.  Each vetted crowd member generates his/her own keywords, ad copy, and deep links to attract prospective pay-per-click customers to the client site.  The result is a much broader span of keywords with less chance of overpaying for over-used common keywords.  By giving access to the long tail of keywords, Trada executes campaigns at lower cost and with greater success than do traditional agencies with in-house employees.

Second, CloudCrowd has 18,000 registered workers who participate in its Labor-as-a-Service business. CloudCrowd’s project managers begin by breaking down a complex task into hundreds or thousands of smaller tasks. These tasks are then passed on to Cloudcrowd’s registered workers. CloudCrowd speeds delivery time and lowers costs in a wide range of BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) applications.  Tasks that CloudCrowd has deconstructed include tracking the University of Southern California’s “lost alumni” and a wide range of web content creation tasks.

Both Trada and CloudCrowd eschew the winner-take-all model of contest-oriented crowdsourcing projects.  Instead, they offer well-defined incremental pay for incremental results.  In the case of Trada, an expert gets paid for each click-through of the ad that the expert created (Trada also offers pay-per-sale crowdsourced campaigns).  CloudCrowd gives its workers a pre-agreed payment for each unit of work they successfully complete.  In CloudCrowd’s case, a worker’s “success” is measured using a system of escalating peer reviews that are also crowdsourced.

Both Trada and CloudCrowd create carefully-cultivated crowds — more like reliable workforces than mobs of transient volunteers of dubious quality.  Trada uses online testing and verified identities to ensure that its experts are really experts.  CloudCrowd assesses each worker’s percentage of correctly-completed tasks to compute a Credibility Rating.  Highly-rated workers gain access to higher-level, higher-paying tasks.

Action

• Evaluate which business processes might benefit from on-going outside expertise or labor
• Create clear tasks and clear rewards
• Create processes to vet or rate prospective crowd members on expertise or quality
• Use the crowd to monitor the crowd

Sources:

Personal interviews with Niel Robertson, CEO, Trada http://trada.com/

and Cloudcrowd (via email) http://www.CloudCrowd.com/

Story: What will the web look like in 20 years? Stuart Miniman of the Office of the CTO at EMC Corporation asked me to contribute my thoughts on this, as part of EMC’s ON magazine celebration of the web’s 20th anniversary.

My predictions for 2030? I know that I don’t know, but I do follow some heuristics that are helpful regardless of which future materializes.

“You can’t predict the future,” said Google’s Eric Schmidt back in 1993 when he was president of Sun Technology Enterprises (a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems). “But you can estimate it.  Your estimations are based on understanding the model of technology.”  Schmidt’s mental model of technology involves looking at underlying drivers and expecting innovation from anywhere. “Don’t think your company is the best and will be the first to come with an innovation in your area.  That attitude will lead you to become blindsided.”

With that in mind, here are two trends I’ll be watching closely for emerging innovations:
* Geo-Spatial Data and Semantic Smarts

Consider these facts by Jeff Jonas, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Scientist, Entity Analytic Solutions, IBM Software Group:

Mobile devices in America are generating something like 600 billion geo-spatially tagged transactions per day. Every call, text message, email and data transfer handled by your mobile device creates a transaction with your space-time coordinate, whether you have GPS or not. Every few minutes, it sends a heartbeat, creating a transaction whether you are using the phone or not.

The implications? Companies can use data analytics to learn unprecedented amounts of information on their customers (how far they travel, locations where they hang out, the people they hang out with). It may sound like big brother, but some consumers are already turning this into a big game and social lifestyle with the help of companies like Foursquare, Loopt, Brightkite, etc. There’ll be opportunities for companies to use this data combined with web-based data to serve their customers better.

With every device and service gathering more and more data and becoming more connected, systems will begin to “understand” the meaning of the data to give people what they want.  I don’t know if real AI will ever happen, but with all the available data, social tools, and clever people building clever companies, it seems that devices are going to act like they know the meaning behind the data and and take or suggestion actions to help you. For example, if your cellphone knows your calendar’s next appointment, your location, and gets the Tweets about the traffic jam on the highway, it can alert you to leave a little earlier or alert whomever you’re meeting that you’ll be late.

* Social/Distributed Decision-Making

Knowledge-intensive tasks such new product and service development will be aided by enterprise-wide collaboration systems with built-in voting, reputation systems, and predictive markets.  These concepts were envisioned by MIT Prof. Thomas W. Malone before the Web as we know it even existed. His publications, such as Computers, Networks and the Corporation, describe the organizational changes that networked computers would bring.

Tom Malone now heads the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT. The center’s basic research question is:  How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?

I think one of the most powerful uses of the web in the future is for crowdsourcing and open innovation to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems.  Take, for example, that Innocentive just announced a GlobalGiveback Innovation Challenge Set to help solve some of the world’s water problems through open innovation. Other crowdsourcing platforms like ideas4all.com are enabling entrepreneurs to suggest product, service and business ideas to win funding.  The web will enable collaboration on a global scale that will let us marshal our creative energies to tackle global issues.

What do you think?

And, yes, whatever the future brings, there’ll be an app for that.

Action

• Look for things that are becoming ubiquitous but aren’t being used as much as they could be.
• Avoid self-centered attitudes about the future. Just because you don’t want to be tracked doesn’t mean others don’t want to be tracked or that someone won’t create a fun and rewarding reason to change your mind about tracking.
• Look for chocolate+peanut-butter combinations like geo-spatial data + semantics.
• Test out some crowdsourcing platforms (ideas4all.com is public and ongoing) to get a feel for how they work. Consider how you could apply them.

Sources:

EMC’s ON magazine: The Web at Twenty

Jeff Jonas: Your Movements Speak for Themselves

Eric Schmidt at the University of Colorado-Boulder, February 9, 1993

Story: Barcelona invested heavily to revamp the city to attract tourists for the Olympics and beyond. What places did tourists visit? What did they see and like? What did they tell their friends about? The city can measure tourism dollars, but the intangible experience of pleasure is harder to measure.

The Los Ojos Del Mundo (The World’s Eyes) project helps provide some answers. The project looks at the publicly-available photos on Flickr that people post of Spain. Using data mining and visualization techniques, team members from MIT’s SENSEable city lab plotted photos onto a map of Spain. The concentration of photos shows which places tourists deem most photoworthy and want to share with their friends.

Action: Consider what data is publicly available on your product, brand, or city. Flickr, Twitter and blogs are all rich sources of user-generated photos, opinions or reviews. Analyze which features or aspects of your product are displayed or mentioned. This data helps reveal how customers portray, experience or feel about your product.

For more information: See Los ojos del mundo (the world’s eyes) for full information on the project as well as additional photos, courtesy of http://senseable.mit.edu/worldseyes/press.html
Girardin, F., Calabrese, F., Dal Fiore, F., Ratti, C., and Blat, J. (2008). Digital footprinting: Uncovering tourists with user-generated content. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 7(4):36-43.
Girardin, F., Dal Fiore, F., Ratti, C., and Blat, J. (2008). Leveraging explicitly disclosed location information to understand tourist dynamics: A case study. Journal of Location-Based Services, 2, 1, 41-54.
For more on creative design and the field of information visualization: Information Aesthetics