For those of us seeking to convince ourselves of the power of crowdsourcing, we need not look any further than Wikipedia. Other examples of crowdsourcing abound. Threadless, an online community of designers, conducts weekly competitions for T-shirt design and prints the winning designs. Quora, a great Q&A website, sources both questions and answers from its members. Procter & Gamble uses crowdsourcing heavily to generate ideas about packaging, marketing etc. The list goes on.
There are two fundamental approaches to crowdsourcing: competition and collaboration.
In competitive sourcing, you look for the best input by designing incentives to win. Competition weeds out the mediocre and elicits the best anyone in the crowd has to offer. The Threadless model, for example, appears primarily to be based on competition.
In collaborative sourcing, you get people to work together in communities to solve problems or come up with new ideas. This model works best when you are looking at projects that a single person might not easily be able to work on. The open source software movement, as well as Wikipedia, are examples of crowdsourcing based on communities that collaborate.
In essence, both competition and collaboration play on three fundamental types of human motivation: intrinsic, extrinsic and pro-social. A person experiences intrinsic motivation when he or she simply likes to do something. For example, you might be an expert in disaster management, and you may simply want to answer a question on earthquakes because you are interested in the topic. Extrinsic motivation follows rational thought. It makes you wonder: what is in it for me? Cash prizes, coupons, discounts and reward points would create extrinsic motivation. Pro-social motivation has to do with social factors. People like to be 'liked', and seek feedback and validation. A lot of online content uploading is motivated by pro-social factors.
When defining a good crowd-sourcing business model, the entrepreneur must ask these questions: How would I approach crowdsourcing - through competition or collaboration or both? How can I create the right mix of the various motivations so that I can build a great community that produces the best? In short, why should the crowd care to participate in my enterprise?
There are two fundamental approaches to crowdsourcing: competition and collaboration.
In competitive sourcing, you look for the best input by designing incentives to win. Competition weeds out the mediocre and elicits the best anyone in the crowd has to offer. The Threadless model, for example, appears primarily to be based on competition.
In collaborative sourcing, you get people to work together in communities to solve problems or come up with new ideas. This model works best when you are looking at projects that a single person might not easily be able to work on. The open source software movement, as well as Wikipedia, are examples of crowdsourcing based on communities that collaborate.
In essence, both competition and collaboration play on three fundamental types of human motivation: intrinsic, extrinsic and pro-social. A person experiences intrinsic motivation when he or she simply likes to do something. For example, you might be an expert in disaster management, and you may simply want to answer a question on earthquakes because you are interested in the topic. Extrinsic motivation follows rational thought. It makes you wonder: what is in it for me? Cash prizes, coupons, discounts and reward points would create extrinsic motivation. Pro-social motivation has to do with social factors. People like to be 'liked', and seek feedback and validation. A lot of online content uploading is motivated by pro-social factors.
When defining a good crowd-sourcing business model, the entrepreneur must ask these questions: How would I approach crowdsourcing - through competition or collaboration or both? How can I create the right mix of the various motivations so that I can build a great community that produces the best? In short, why should the crowd care to participate in my enterprise?
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