Crowdsourcing and organizational design: The overlooked aspect can make a difference!

Crowdsourcing, a concept of discovering new ideas and innovations by a large number of external people, is becoming popular in the business world due to increasing uncertainty in business premises. Side by side, project failure rates are increasing in competition with their popularity.

If we look at the framework of crowdsourcing, it is a simple event with some episodes. Generally, crowdsourcing consists of inviting some external contributors, giving them specific topics or problems, and asking them to innovate with some breakthrough innovations and ideas.

In Bangladesh, we sometimes see open invitations for submitting innovative ideas for specified topics with lucrative rewards declarations. People with enthusiasm from everywhere submit their ideas on an open or prescribed platform. Later, we see few declarations of acceptance of ideas, but many dissatisfactions and reactions to not receiving feedback.

Working in organizations and now in the consulting profession gives me the scope to talk with some managers who were engaged in these events. Most of the comments are "we did not get good ideas what we expected" and "all ideas were not checked due to huge responses".

The question is why organizations are not able to reap their crops in spite of planting plantations with excellent seeds.

Let’s read the story. Mr. Reza, a top university business graduate, started a business – a platform with 2000 members from various backgrounds where they work in addition to their own main professions. Their service is to give innovative ideas to organizations. The process of idea generation consists of collecting problems and topics from organizations, posting them on the platform, having members post their ideas and counter ideas, evaluating and picking the top ideas, and finally delivering the top ideas to organizations. The remuneration system is that everyone gets paid according to the matrix of their own grade, membership duration, and contribution to the project. Payment is made after each project.

After 2 years, Mr. Reza finds that 70% of the ideas (projects) have been rejected by organizations. Most of the comments are "your ideas are not suited to our organizational philosophy, organizational climate, organizational environment, organizational culture, and customer’s choice. He also identified that the committee that has evaluated and finalized ideas needs to be reorganized as the process itself blocked noble ideas.

If we translate the identified problems, we will see alignment, interdependency, and compatibility are not taken care of, where organizational design comes into play.

Can the overlooked aspects make the difference, indeed?