Crowdsourcing, What does it mean for the Enterprise?
Wired mag has a great article in their latest issue on crowdsourcing and how large corporations are using this to their advantage. There are the more well known examples like youtube using crowds to rank and categorize videos or iStockphoto that leverages amateurs or part-time photographers to sell low cost stock imagery. The article goes beyond those examples to talk about how companies like P&G and Colgate-Palmolive are using amateur scientists to solve scientific challenges. From the wired article…
“The giant packaged goods company needed a way to inject fluoride powder into a toothpaste tube without it dispersing into the surrounding air. Melcarek knew he had a solution by the time heâd finished reading the challenge: Impart an electric charge to the powder while grounding the tube. The positively charged fluoride particles would be attracted to the tube without any significant dispersion.”
Applying the open source model to large enterprise creates a couple of challenges to widely held corporate priorities. Not the least being security and openess in general. Traditionally large enterprises are very guarded around their intellectual property or any of their internal information. Open source is succesful becuase it’s just that open. Most corporations have challenges open up their internal information to their own employees.
Colgage-Palmolive and P&G get around that by using an intermediary called InnoCentive. InnoCentive aggregates the mass of hobbyists out there and focuses them on the right challenges from large and small enterprise. Focusing on opening up the right content in a secure and safe manner will enable enterprises to apply crowdsourcing both from employees internally and externally.
We’ve seen this in some of the more recent applications of digital dashboards. Notice I didn’t call them executive dashboards, because that wouldn’t be leveraging crowdsourcing principles. Dashboards are meant to display metrics on how to run a business. If you aren’t sharing those metrics across the organization how are people going to help guide the business? That’s why we think it’s an important principle to make sure that critical business metrics are shared throughout an organization enabling employees to be able to help guide the business at all levels.
