{"id":1207,"date":"2010-05-25T13:42:52","date_gmt":"2010-05-25T19:42:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/workingknowledge.com\/blog\/?p=1207"},"modified":"2023-03-02T21:28:24","modified_gmt":"2023-03-03T03:28:24","slug":"crowdsourcing-moves-beyond-open-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/crowdsourcing-moves-beyond-open-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"Crowdsourcing Moves Beyond Open Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Point<\/strong>: Crowdsourcing is maturing beyond its amateur-content and open innovation origins toward core business processes.<\/p>\n

Story<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

In the beginning, companies used crowdsourcing as part of their open innovation efforts to get new \"\"<\/a>ideas from lead users, customers, and the world at large.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As CloudCrowd CEO Alex Edelstein sees it, “similar to the way Henry Ford\u2019s early assembly lines created a new, more efficient way to complete work, we\u2019ve designed an online process that delivers accurate finished work for even complex projects at a significant savings.\u201d\u00a0 Let’s look at these two examples.<\/p>\n

First, Trada Inc.<\/a>, which recently emerged from stealth mode private beta, offers crowds of pay-per-click experts who create paid-search marketing campaigns.\u00a0 Each vetted crowd member generates his\/her own keywords, ad copy, and deep links to attract prospective pay-per-click\"\"<\/a> customers to the client site.\u00a0 The result is a much broader span of keywords with less chance of overpaying for over-used common keywords.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Second, CloudCrowd<\/a> 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.\u00a0 Tasks that CloudCrowd has deconstructed include tracking the University of Southern California’s “lost alumni” and a wide range of web content creation tasks.<\/p>\n

Both Trada and CloudCrowd eschew the winner-take-all model of contest-oriented crowdsourcing projects.\u00a0 Instead, they offer well-defined incremental pay for incremental results.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 CloudCrowd gives its workers a pre-agreed payment for each unit of work they successfully complete.\u00a0 In CloudCrowd’s case, a worker’s “success” is measured using a system of escalating peer reviews that are also crowdsourced.<\/p>\n

Both Trada and CloudCrowd create carefully-cultivated crowds — more like reliable workforces than mobs of transient volunteers of dubious quality.\u00a0 Trada uses online testing and verified identities to ensure that its experts are really experts.\u00a0 CloudCrowd assesses each worker’s percentage of correctly-completed tasks to compute a Credibility Rating.\u00a0 Highly-rated workers gain access to higher-level, higher-paying tasks.<\/p>\n

Action<\/strong><\/p>\n