syed2 syed2 Creative Action in Organisations
ENTE 3506
Word Count: 1524
Tutor: Andrew Nicholson
Creative Action in Organisations
ENTE 3506
Word Count: 1524
Tutor: Andrew Nicholson
“Critically appraise the role of crowd sourcing in today’s rapidly changing global business environments and its contribution to innovation.”
Assigment 3
“Critically appraise the role of crowd sourcing in today’s rapidly changing global business environments and its contribution to innovation.”
Assigment 3

“Critically appraise the role of crowd sourcing in today’s rapidly changing global business environments and its contribution to innovation.”

Crowdsourcing is finally coming of age especially with a prominent rise in recent years, it is recognised crowdsourcing is an online phenomena which aims to distribute problem solving and production to impact on the present day’s rapidly changing global business environment.
This essay provides an introduction to crowdsourcing, analysed through a theoretical basis in reference to examples, moreover paying particular attention to distinguish and define crowdsourcing from open source production. Furthermore this essay also critically explores the prospects for the paradigm. The potential to exploit and impact a crowd of innovators will be assessed likewise to an evaluation of the opportunity for the use outside ‘for-profit’ organisations. To conclude, this essay recommends an outline and plan for research into the role of crowdsourcing and its contribution.
It is recognised that the key to success is inevitably put down to creating; such an attitude has made way for an era for open innovation. Open innovation allows businesses an open platform around their innovations which in effect has allowed many businesses to adopt and adapt to a new and fresh approach to which their businesses plan and develop their technology from a fresh angle as well as offering an insight into their own work from a different point of view. According to Doctor Henry Chesbrough, Executive Director of the Program in Open Innovation ““Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively.”
This paradigm thus allows the businesses to think creatively outside of the box, going beyond the business norm and pushing themselves out of the confinements of the business to come up with potential solutions and results to problems and complications in addition to offering and delivering key ideas and concepts to their associates. Crowdsourcing is a key strategic method for the paradigm for open innovation, according to Ethan Seltzer and Dillon Mahmoudi’s Journal of Planning Literature February 2013 entitled ‘Citizen Participation, Open Innovation, and Crowdsourcing: Challenges and Opportunities for Planning’ it is recognised that crowdsourcing issues a “challenge to a large and diverse group in hopes of arriving at new solutions more robust than those found inside the organization.” So what defines crowdsourcing? The term crowdsourcing is an important business idea and strategy which plays a vital role to optimise and advance businesses in technology and in effect evolve amongst a rapidly changing market. Although the approach varies and is not just limited to one definition, the principle idea is that businesses adopt this method to outsource and tap into the combined intelligence of the peoples view thus usually involves a large group of the public to play an active part in the business project, this consequently supports the business to operate crowdsourcing methods as a tactic to develop further internal and external application. This large group of people play a key role in completing business linked tasks which on a norm would be carried out by the businesses themselves or be outsourced to a third party firm. According to Jennifer Alsever overview and review on ‘What is crowdsourcing’ it is clearly visible that crowdsourcing overall enables businesses “to expand the size of their talent pool while also gaining deeper insight into what customers really want.”
Due to innovation in technology and the internet there has been a huge increase in user generated and social media such as YouTube, Facebook, blogs, MySpace and many others. This reflects the loss of traditional methods and is a notion that there is a very thin line between producers and consumers which is ever increasing and mirrors the growing image of the public’s collective input. An article in the Time magazine (2006) written by Lev Grossman emphasised that "We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy."
There are multiple theoretical methods to crowdsourcing, this is evident from Jeff Howe’s book (2008) on crowdsourcing entitled ‘Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business,’ where some theories are put into practice “upon active collaboration within virtual community of individuals, while others benefit from the opposite.” It also identified from the context of the book that there are four primary types of crowdsourcing approaches which are; Crowd Wisdom; Crowd Creation; Crowd Voting and Crowd Funding. There are also 8 steps to fulfil in order to be successful in crowdsourcing as shown by appendix 1.
Crowdsourcing has revolutionised the way businesses operate and think and it has become a vital organ for many organisations. Therefore it is strongly suggested that crowdsourcing should inevitable become a central focal point of a company’s approach and strategy, using the assistance and support of the public to create and venture into creating better ideas for businesses.
Crowdsourcing has changed the face of many businesses especially in terms of the way the ideas are executed. The following is an examples of this globally used technique which has been strategically implemented to develop and deliver the company’s idea and overview; Verizon used this technique where at the start of January 2013, the company announced the launch of a brand new project called Powerful Answers. The aim of this project was to raise and promote awareness of the company’s wireless network's new 4G service, the core factor of this challenging and highly invested venture is to produce innovative ideas in the healthcare, education and sustainability sectors, a task which strongly called for crowdsourcing likewise in addition to everyone else involved, which emphasised primarily on the approach of ‘crowd creation.’
According to a blog in the Guardian website written by a guardian professional Matthew Yeomans (2013) businesses implement crowdsourcing as a “mobilising and marketing tool, which taps into the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ to demonstrate just how much each company needs the insight and input of its social media community to realise its sustainability goals.”
It is suggested that the strong points of crowd sourcing is that in the long term it can play a substantial key factor in improving and furthering production and creativity whilst benefitting by dramatically reducing labour and the many expenses of research and analysis. Time is also effectively managed by using the internet to reach the public effectively on a global scale and implore constructive feedback from a large community of active consumers as this approach significantly cuts down on time spent on collecting data in traditional methods such as questionnaires, whilst gaining genuine interests for upcoming trends and latest products. Moreover by involving this vast circle of consumers through crowdsourcing managements are able to cut down costs on unnecessary PR activities.

The weak spots of crowdsourcing is that as the public are not part of the business workforce, the management cannot impose authority on them thus control them as they would an employee, the public are thus independent of this. Although the public will not gain any sort of financial incentive they still expect recognition in the form of gratitude and appreciation moreover the businesses must meet the public’s demand in terms of time and commitment.
Consequently this major shift and approach may come as a difficult challenge for many traditionally executed business approaches...
Crowdsourcing is a strong concept and approach which does not belong to any one individual nor organisation, its success in execution relies on the combination of the business and the public alike, which combined together, have proven to contribute strongly and powerfully to the evolution of a rapidly changing business environment.
In conclusion it has been identified that crowdsourcing has been strongly embellished in the eyes of the global business market due its vast success factor however this rise can also easily fall prey to sceptical eyes and lose its shimmer, thus this technique needs to be shielded from turning into a stale marketing method moreover it should be understood that likewise to social media crowdsourcing is also a state of mind.
Conventionally the global market houses apprehensive and share-averse decision making in the corporate world, so in such areas crowdsourcing should be tacticfully approached.
In some cases companies may argue and differ that you have to visibly demonstrate the ‘wisdom of the crowd,’ which can positively effect and consequently connect and strengthen consumers in the areas of the business plan, research and development stages.
Starbucks and Dell are such examples of this paradigm where although their crowd -sourced actions and ideas have been scrutinised the companies are still able to point out and emphasise what is conceivable in relation to the role of crowdsourcing in improving businesses, hence when companies open up their doors to the public and community and allow them to see what challenges they face, they are able to then muster up and achieve solutions from parts of the community they would never have sought to seek in the past, giving them a broad spectrum to reach millions globally.

Referencing
Alsever J. (2007). What Is Crowdsourcing? Available: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-51052961/what-is-crowdsourcing/. Last accessed 16th march 2013.
Bafoutsou, G. and Mentzas, G. (2002). Review and functional classification of collaborative systems. International Journal of Information Management. Vol. 22 (4) pp.281-305
Bell, J. and Loane, S. (2010). ‘New Wave’ global firms: Web 2.0 and SME internationalisation. Journal of Marketing Management. Vol. 26 (3-4) pp. 213-229
Bonabeau, E. (2009). Decisions 2.0: The Power of Collective Intelligence. MIT Sloan Management Review. Vol. 50 (2) pp. 45-52
Brabham, D.C. (2008). Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving: An Introduction and Cases. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Vol. 14 (1) pp.75-90
Chesbrough, H. W. (2003). The Era of Open Innovation. MIT Sloan Management Review. Vol. 44 (3) pp.35-41
Estellés-Arolas, E. and González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, F. (2012). Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition. Journal of Information Science. Vol. 38 (2) pp.189-200
Grossman l. (2006). You — Yes, You — Are TIME's Person of the Year. Available: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570810,00.html. Last accessed 17th march 2013. howe J. (2008). Crowdsourcing. Available: http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/oct08-jeff-howe-crowdsourcing/. Last accessed 16th march 2013.
Huberman, B. A., Romero, D. M., and Wu, F. (2009). Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity. Journal of Information Science. Vol. 35 (6) pp. 758-765
Kleeman, F., Voss, G.G., and Rieder K. (2008). Un(der)paid Innovators: The Commercial Utilization of Consumer Work through crowdsourcing. Science, Technology and Innovation Studies. Vol. 4(1) pp. 5-26
Maiolini, R. and Naggi, R. (2011). Crowdsourcing and SMEs: Opportunities and challenges. In: D’Atri, A., Ferrara, M., George, J. F., and Spagnoletti, P. eds. (2011). Information Technology and Innovation Trends in Organizations. New York: Springer. pp. 399-40
Stieger, D., Matzler, K., Chatterjee, S., and Ladstaetter-Fussenegger, F. (2012). Democratizing Strategy: How Crowdsourcing Can Be Used For Strategy Dialogues. California Management Review. Vol. 54 (4) pp. 44-68
Surowiecki, J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few. London: Abacus
[The Crowdsourcing Process]. (n.d.). Image by Brabham, D. [Image Online]. Available from: http://wheel.ucdavis.edu/2013/02/crowdsourcing-community-forums/ [Accessed 10 March 2013]
Wexler, M. N. (2011). Reconfiguring the Sociology of the Crowd: Exploring Crowdsourcing. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. Vol. 31 (1) pp.6-20
Yeomans M. (2013). Why crowdsourcing should become part of a company's DNA. Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/blog/crowdsourcing

Appendix 1: 8 Steps to succeed with Crowdsourcing