Crowdsourcing, co-creation and ideation using social media

Guest Lecture, University of Western Sydney 200852 Innovation, Creativity and Foresight

Email: suresh.sood@uts.edu.au LinkedIn: sureshsood

Skype: sureshsoodTwitter: soody

Google +: http://gplus.to/Soody

• 18th century, the British government offers £20,000 to John Harrison for a chronometer to calculate ship longitude

• 1919, Raymond Orteig offers a $25,000 prize for the first nonstop transatlantic flight between New York and Paris. Charles Lindbergh won the prize with his famous flight in the Spirit of St. Louis.

• 2004, Ansari X Prize, offered $10 million for reusable spacecraft

• $1 million Netflix Prize improve =accuracy of movie recommendations multinational team won

• Build awareness and engagement a powerful marketing tool for awareness of and engagement with a cause, initiative, or product.

• A public challenge with a difficult, interesting or compelling goal can capture the imagination of the public & press

• Exit surveys show people who participate in challenges develop more favorable opinion of sponsoring organization

• Challenges are different from contests and sweepstakes that use chance to identify winners vs. skill and creativity.

• Generate superior impact and return on investment with positive press and lasting engagement; a new or strengthened community; and real solutions to real problems.

• challenges use a pay-for-success model, but people are motivated by more than just money. Status, recognition, altruism, the joy of problem solving and the competitive spirit are also huge motivators

• Challenges lead participants to invest substantial time and sometimes capital, in developing solutions. 9 teams that competed for the $25,000 Orteig Prizes spent $400,000 on their attempts to complete the first transatlantic flight. The $10 million Ansari X Prize led to an estimated $100 million investment in spacecraft technology. ChallengePost has powered numerous challenges in which the value of submissions was estimated to be 100-200 times the total prize money.

Crowdsourcing Drives Innovation and Creativity

Rules of the new marketing (SMMP) using social media

1. Authenticity 2. Advocacy3. Marketing is real time conversations and feedback4. Brand is the conversations

videos

tweets

posts

Public.ideavibes.com

What is crowdsourcing ?

• Crowdsourcing = Crowd + (via open call) Outsourcing

• Tasks outsourced via open call to a large community

• Proven tasks

– Crowdfunding (pledge based,peer to peer and equity venture investing) – crowd knowledge (Wikipedia)– Crowd creativity (99designs,Shutterstock, iStockphoto, Deviant Art , Fiverrr

and soundcloud)– Crowd labour (Amazon Turk, CrowdFlower)– Open innovation (Innocentive, challenge.gov)

• Crowd receives anything from financial return to social recognition

CROWDSOURCING: A DEFINITION

I [Jeff Howe] like to use two definitions for crowdsourcing:

The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

Jeff Howe (2008) , http://www.crowdsourcing.com/cs/

Or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0-UtNg3ots

Initial definition

“Crowdsourcing is the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of a specialized few.”

Howe (2006) Wired

Key principles of the crowd

• Dispersed• Short attention span• Full of specialists• Produce mostly rubbish• Find the best stuff

Source: “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” by Jeff Howe (2006)

Marketers Crowdsource Video and Advertising Production

Use Cases

• Ideation

• Expertise

• Freelance

• Software

• Micro-tasks

The largest funding platform for creative projects in the world

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Crowdfund Investing

• CrowdFlower makes it possible for any company to conveniently hire a large workforce to complete data heavy projects by offering online labor-on-demand.

• CrowdFlower are experts at microtasking, a form of crowdsourcing that distills massive data information that requires human attention (such as business listing verification, product categorization or sentiment analysis) into tangible and actionable tasks for processing. This processing is done by the world’s largest, distributed labor pool – the crowd.

Service Innovation - Crowdsourcing

The Business Model Innovation Hub is where the management book bestseller Business Model Generation was written in collaboration with 470 participants.

Google Moderator – Crowdsourcing from Large Scale Conversations

• create a series and open it up for people to submit questions, ideas, or suggestions (submissions)

• Submissions can contain YouTube videos

• Collect questions (e.g. whitehouse.gov/OpenForQuestions) or ideas (e.g. www.google.com/tipjar)

• enables a unique conversation with a community by allowing people to come together to voice their issues and have them addressed.

• gives every participant a chance to have their question rise to the top and to easily give input by voting.

• prioritizes the questions most important to your community by the number of votes received per question.

• Encourage sharing - the sharing button allows users to share their ideas on Facebook, Twitter, and over email. This will drive even more traffic to your series.

• Embedding a Moderator series on your website immediately increases traffic, engagement, and visibility.

• In addition to answering the top submissions for a series, browse through the entire list to find good submissions, or groups of good submissions, as well (Ten similar ideas with 100 votes each is equivalent to 1 idea with 1000 votes).

eYeka contests challenges communities to envision future productsand creative product development

Communities Leverage Existing Data In New Ways

nycbigapps.com

Crowd-Sourcing Ideas for NASA's Future: Citizen Engagement Analysis

• Feb 2010 General Services Administration (GSA) launched a Citizen Engagement Tool based on the IdeaScale platform and 22 federal agencies including NASA (opennasa.ideascale.com)

• Platform allows members of public to submit, rank, and comment on ideas as to how NASA can best fulfill the goals of the Open Government Directive by becoming more transparent, participatory, collaborative, and innovative.

• NASA moderators remotely work together to help shape the community

• The first couple of weeks are crucial for emerging communities, as it sets the tone and behavior

• NASA paid close attention and assisted ideas that were off topic to be reshaped and articulated to be more useful to Open Government.

• After a couple weeks, many people began to comment on other ideas and it became a community-moderated site.

• Change the default landing page to 'most popular’ NASA elects to not move off-topic ideas, as the community would vote them down

• For promotion, web stories on www.nasa.gov, tweeted with the @NASA account, and alerts people to contribute from Facebook page

• Internally issued an Agency-wide e-mail to encourage employees to contribute to the discussion.

• By March 19, when the period for collecting ideas closed, NASA had received the most traffic out of any Agency's site, with more than 453 ideas and 8,000 votes.

NASA Citizen Engagement

NASA to sponsor space-themed

"user-generated" conference.

Lessons Learnt

• Percentage of off-topic responses (25%) requires focus of discussions on relevant and implementable ideas via clear and narrow topic for people to present their ideas.

• the office or program seeking engagement should understand what they want to get out of it and identify resources to implement the ideas generated. This immediate feedback would then allow the community created to see the direct response to their efforts.

• Some ideas were similar, and surprisingly, in more than one case were submitted by different NASA employees. By having an open dialogue, this has increased internal collaboration as some people were working independently on different solutions to a similar problem.

• Some of the ideas submitted to the site were infeasible or otherwise unpractical for NASA to address, yet received a high number of votes. Moving forward, it is important to establish a framework and procedures for strategically implementing ideas, including ways to work with idea authors when their submissions are, for various reasons, not able to be accomplished by the Agency.

Whitehouse Advisors on Science and Technology

http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/grand-challenges

http://www.whitehouse.gov/we-the-geeks

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Request for Information to Provide Government wide Challenge Platform, 08 Apr 2010

"To support agencies in the execution of prizes that further the policy objectives of the Federal Government, the Administration will make available a web-based platform for prizes and challenges within 120 days. This platform will provide a forum for agencies to post problems and invite communities of problem solvers to suggest, collaborate on, and deliver solutions. Over the longer term, the General Services Administration (GSA) will also provide government-wide services to share best practices and assist agencies in developing guidelines for issuing challenges. Additionally, GSA will develop, as expeditiously as possible, a contract vehicle to provide agency access to relevant products and services, including technical assistance in structuring and conducting contests to take maximum benefit of the marketplace as they identify and pursue contest initiatives to further the policy objectives of the Federal Government.”

…This Request for Information seeks information on solutions for making available a web-based platform that enables agencies to create, launch, and administer contests and challenges, to be brought online by July 6, 2010. The platform being sought will be used by GSA, and offered by GSA to other federal agencies in order to launch their own contests and challenges. More than one provider, after reading the OMB memorandum, has alerted GSA to a no-cost solution to providing a web-based platform for government challenges. For purposes of this RFI, GSA seeks a no-cost contract or unconditional gift. The no-cost solution must not be tied to required, ancillary fee-based products or services. That is, GSA and other agencies must be able to use the product at a maximum level of technical functionality without being required to purchase ancillary services and products from the offerer, although the offerer may offer support for configuration, setup and other initial tasks, also at no cost. The no-cost solution must not lock GSA or other agencies into one provider, and should be able to be discontinued at any time by any agency without imposing legal or financial commitments upon it. GSA cannot accept a no-cost solution if the provider's intent is to provide the solution for no-cost now, and then begin charging GSA at a later date for what is being offered.

• a public marketplace for creating contests with prizes for solving problems

• Software competition platform and services to companies with open APIs, public data, or SDKs

• Web platform that connects talented problem solvers with rewarding challenges

• Clients include First Lady Michelle Obama and the USDA, the City of New York (and the NYC BigApps challenge), Thomson Reuters, Samsung, the World Bank, Lollapalooza, the MTA…

• Created and power the Governmentwide Challenge Platform across all federal agencies for crowdsourced problem-solving: http://challenge.gov.

• Online challenge platform of US federal government

Taken from “The Onrushing wave”, Economist, 18 Jan 2014