Without the right skills and capabilities, it isn’t easy to achieve desired results. Crowdsourcing allows you to tap into the crowd's collective intelligence to improve performance and discover new ideas.
The idea is to figure out ways to improve and enhance products or services to become twice as appealing to the market. However, despite the apparent benefits, only a few companies understand and capitalize on crowdsourcing's true potential.
Let’s consider the benefits of open innovation, or what’s more commonly known as crowdsourcing innovation. Read on to learn more about the benefits of business crowdsourcing, and how you can utilize this business method.
Gain Fresh Perspectives
It’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind of building a business. Everyone has ideas, and most people love sharing them too. Unfortunately, great ideas often go unheard or unused.
Projects that are crowdsourced-driven experience advancements quickly. The notion of “two heads being better than one” is accurate for crowd innovation. Imagine a community comprised of hundreds or even thousands of willing participants eager to innovate and create solutions.
Connect with Your Customers
Several businesses across many industries are choosing to get directly involved by asking for customer feedback. There are many ways to connect with your customers.
Invite them to share in the creation and improving products and services your company provides. Innovation shouldn’t be thought of as a one-sided process.
Make sure your customers understand how they will benefit from being involved. Encouraging collaboration will help to facilitate trust.
Improve Your Branding
Crowdsourcing your brand’s growth can lead to conversations with influencers that otherwise may not occur. These conversations can foster a sense of identity and a common purpose, strengthening the bond between brands and customers.
Being open-minded and transparent throughout the process increases the odds of positive results. In the end, both parties involved should gain value and experience.
Stay Within Your Budget
When funding is a concern finding solutions using a traditional, in-house approach might not be feasible. The time involved with internal brainstorming, validating, and putting ideas into an actionable process can be grossly underestimated.
Seeking engagement from the crowd can help lower your overall cost and reduce the time involved to reach predefined goals.
Network to Build an Engaged Community
Although building a networked community is listed last, it doesn’t necessarily make it the least important benefit. Without an engaged community having aligned goals, success is limited.
An online community as a whole is smarter than its members as individuals. Contributions by those connected via the Internet are breathing life into projects of all sizes. Now is the time to embrace your community’s ability to crowdsource problem-solving solutions at scale.
Cost-Effective
The best part about crowdsourcing is that it is very cheap compared to all other alternatives, like hiring a new designer or innovator.
Additionally, you will also save a lot of time and money by eliminating processes, like brainstorming or validating. So, not only is it one of the best methods for coming up with innovations, but it can also be more cost-effective.
A global initiative to rapidly drive innovation beyond your organization’s in-house capacity means a better quality product or service.
Conclusion
In summary, crowdsourcing innovation is an awesome way to utilize a combination of resources readily available to your business. Both companies and crowds have their own challenges.
However, the ability to tackle an idea cooperatively is a strength companies are beginning to take advantage of. Collective intelligence can provide solutions to problems in a matter of days rather than weeks.