Go beyond your organizational boundary: Crowdsource Knowledge !

The gist- All required knowledge and expertise to run an organization are not available in any single organization. Every organization is in a need to source for outside expertise. Some of these organizations can afford to hire consultants to fill the gap, others try to push its employees to deliver the most and may not reach its target at the end. Why not going beyond the organizational boundary and tap into the knowledge/wisdom of the crowd? A third eye to investigate your challenges and offer some solutions would be the trend in coming years — ‘Crowdsourcing’ knowledge is the way to go if your organization wants to be competitive, innovative and making decent profits.

?A bit of History

Crowdsourcing though popular at present, first started more than 300 years ago, when the British government offered ￡20,000 for people to invent a solution for the Longitude problem which made sailing difficult and killing 1,000s of seamen every year. The contest was won by John Harrison, the son of a carpenter who bagged the ￡20,000 from the Government.

Many global companies are using crowdsourcing to solicit ideas and insights from the public. Mostly used for innovation, crowdsourcing aims to obtain ideas/solutions from external individuals (crowd) to solve a specific problem. One of the major benefits of outsourcing is the ability to receive ideas from diverse group of people, finding out solutions that are not readily available within the organization, obtain perspectives from the customers and push for faster problem solving. ?

Organizations addressing uncertain market, rapid change in socio-economic dimensions, dealing with changing consumers spending behavior might want to look outside for new ideas and solutions. Through a crowdsourcing exercise or ideas competition, organizations can invite customers, experts and public to share ideas or even already designed solutions to their problems. ?

Toyota launched a crowdsourcing competition back in 1936 to redesign its logo. Starbucks has a more organized and on-going campaign, called, My Starbucks Idea, to gather ideas from its customers for better quality products and services. The platform allows everyone to view ideas submitted by others and rate them based on individual preferences. There is also a public leaderboard that displays the most dedicated fans, and the most popular ideas. The key success factor to Starbucks’ ideation platform was its commitment towards implementing feasible ideas of its customers. The implementation rate is around 10% and that drives public to contribute their thoughts on a regular basis.

LEO Pharma, a dermatological products company based in Denmark conducted several crowdsourcing competitions for producing ideas such as new product lines or creative solutions to their technical problems. Though the company didn’t find any success with the ideas submitted but they still appreciate the potential of those ideas.

Not only commercial companies, but even Governments around the world have also been using crowdsourcing to engage with the citizens. The Obama administration in 2010 launched Challenge.gov, an online platform that engages the public in solving issues facing federal agencies. The platform allows the agencies to create challenges, review proposals from the public, and then award prizes to the best proposal(s). The portal is still active, and many agencies are actively using it. Many city municipalities also use crowdsourcing platform to collect information and feedback from the residents. The Municipality of Dushanbe (the capital of Tajikistan) used an online platform to collect public reporting of various issues that the city had been facing, i.e. water shortage, pathway holes, drainage problems etc. The City of Boston has been leveraging on crowdsourcing to solve civic problems. The goal is to use technology and data to improve the quality of life in the city.

Crowdsoucing can also have an internal dimension, where organizations want to tap into the collective intelligence of all staff members.

Organizations like IBM used “Innovation Jam” exercise to brainstorm ideas with 150,000 employees from 104 countries and 67 companies. During that session, 46,000 ideas were produced, and 10 new IBM businesses were launched with seed investment totaling US$100mil. This story of IBM shows that an organization needs to be not only serious about sourcing ideas internally but also ensure implementation of the good ones. ?

Case "A": Internal Crowdsourcing of Ideas

?An internal idea sourcing initiative was developed by this multinational organization. The corporate innovation team acquired a cloud-based idea management platform and invited staff to share any ideas that suggest improvements for operational efficiency and performance. Staff were given the opportunity to contribute, comment and vote for their preferred ideas. A committee was formed to vet through the ideas in terms of potential impact and implementation feasibility. Shortlisted idea authors were invited to present in person and clear any questions that the panel might had. The final list of ideas were sent to relevant departments to consider implementation within a specific time frame. It was observed that the implementation rate was quite low compare to the number of ideas generated by the staff, however, the initiative helped create a platform to source internal ideas for improvement, innovation and efficiency.

One of the major obstacles to implement ideas was lack of dedicated resources, both financial and human to work on a new initiative and deliver results on time. Many ideas sent to the departments responsible were not welcomed as staff treated those idea as extra work for them without any a clear incentive program for them. Management did not provide any clear directions to managers on how they should allocate staff time for new initiatives or initiatives that might not bring any results and only see failures. Another observation was that staff were submitting a lot of very basic and HR related ideas, though the call was for operational improvements or for new products and services. After analyzing staff’s ideas for a year and post-interview with them, it was discovered that many staff were not happy with their current HR and career related matters. There was no open platform to share those issues with the Management and others. Therefore, when the idea management system was launched, many started using it as a platform to raise personal issues and to bring Management’s attention to a number of unsolved HR issues. This approach actually undermined the objectives and plans of the ideas platform as majority of the ideas were not addressing the call- efficiency and operational improvements. ?

In addition to the low quality of submitted ideas, absence of a dedicated fund and tolerance for failure hinders implementation of new ideas. After a few years, it was found that the platform was not useful anymore, the inflows of ideas was quit low and the Management had decided to close the internal ideas sourcing exercise.

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Beyond Ideas: Crowdsourcing solutions

While crowdsourcing focuses a lot in generating new ideas, can the same concept be used to explore and identify already implemented solutions to solve a problem?

In many instances, already designed and used solutions by another company can be a good fit to address issues faced by another company, though some sort of customizations might be required. What is critical is the agreement between the companies to use each others’ solutions, sharing of intellectual properties and managing expectations. In a commercial world, all these criteria make it difficult to use and replicate IP protected solutions, but in a developing world, there might be flexibility in using each other’s solutions.

Yomken, a crowdsourcing platform designed by a group of young Egyptians based in Cairo allows Small and Medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to submit their innovation challenge. People within Egypt and outside can share their ideas and solutions to those challenges and the best ideas/solution picked by the companies receive cash incentives. In this way, SMEs can obtain many good ideas from their clients as well as public without going through time consuming and expensive corporate ideation or innovation exercise, which also does not always guarantee the best ideas generation.

The Global Innovation Exchange platform created by USAID, AusAID, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are among others who aim to scale up the most promising global development innovations by connecting innovators, funding, and insights. The platform targets social entrepreneurs in low-and-middle-income countries and provide credible innovation data for the international development community and other ecosystem players. It also provides an opportunity to the innovators to connect with fellow innovators to co-create solutions.

Development Asia , ?another platform developed by the Asian Development Bank invites institutions to share development experiences, expertise and best practices to address the Sustainable Development Goals. The platform provides an opportunity to interact with experts, policy makers, and other practitioners in related fields. The solutions featured on the platform are practical, how-to solutions, technology applications, and policy studies and they come from various partners of the Bank, including its own projects.

Creating a knowledge platform with already implemented (elsewhere), proven, successful development solutions (supply) and pass them to the people/institutions/countries who need it (demand) to replicate/learn is a noble idea; but to practically implement such a match-making may not be that simple.

?Case ‘B’- Crowdsourcing ideas and development solutions externally

?This multinational financial institution developed a crowdsourcing platform with two streams- Stream one focuses on listing already implemented good practices and development solutions from various institutions who are willing to share their solutions with others. Stream two invites public to submit ideas to the challenges posted by the institution itself. For the first phase, the organization launched the stream one solution seeking feature. A few good solutions from around the world were received and uploaded on the platform. Many of those solutions were low-cost and easily replicable. However the platform faced a number of other issues-

?1.?????How to effectively collect those successful solutions? — There is no single database currently exists that lists good, successful, proven, implemented solutions in various development fields. Many of the solutions are implemented at community level where no proper knowledge capture was conducted. Other solutions originated by institutions fall into the dilemma of IP protection/institutional property and thus labelled as ‘not shareable’.

2.????How to motivate individuals/institutions to share? — Why would someone or an institution will share their solution son the platform? Some crowdsourcing platforms promote that the participated solutions providers will get a wider global community attention; providers will be noticed by the funders or others in the ecosystem who would like to replicate their models. Such a promise might be quite far from the reality. I am not questioning the underlying intentions of those platform initiators (the intentions are great) but to practically help those solution providers requires a lot of effort. Platform organizers need to continuously engage with various actors in the ecosystem to replicate/scale up the solutions, provide some sort of seed funding, technical assistance to both the supply and the demand side. Having all these elements together with the online platform requires proper allocation of resources (financial and human) in order to keep the momentum alive and to spread the vibes. The organization in this case study did not have these resources in place, therefore, getting good solutions from external parties was very difficult. Due to technical complexities, as well as control over the content, the platform editing access was restricted only to the developer institution. Every new solutions needed to be uploaded by the platform coordinator, which needed to be vetted through by the solutions owners’ institutions- this process added extra burden to the platform management.

3.????What else to keep the interest level high? — In order to keep people and institutions contribute and engage in fruitful conversations on the platform, regular interventions are needed. This may include- organizing annual event ( by inviting selected solutions providers), holding online competitions (and offer monetary incentives), feature solutions with providers in other popular platforms. These are much easier interventions compared to connecting with the funders and providing seed funding for prospective replication. The institution also faced financial constraint to deliver non-platform based activities to keep the interest level high.

4.???What it takes to deliver a successful intervention- If we think for replicating a development solution from one country to another (as one of the interventions to keep the crowdsourcing platform attractive to all), a number of elements need to be in place. First of all, one needs to find ‘the demand’- an institution in a country willing to learn from the solution and match it with the ‘supply’- the solution provider. Followed by that initial fact finding exercise, one needs to organize a communication session that may trigger a feasibility study. Several issues might arise- the receiving institution’s ability to replicate the solution in terms of finance as well as its staff capacity to understand the technicalities and processes.

For example, a very innovative solution to improving soil fertility developed by an institution in ‘country A’ may require recipient country’s relevant authorities, ?and farmers to have some technical knowledge/expertise on soil fertility. If the technical knowledge is missing, a knowledge transfer/learning program should be designed to transfer the knowledge- these are all very time and budget consuming activities. How many platforms will provide such packages (not only the online system but also the technical assistance wrapped with financing) to the solutions providers. Failure to close the loop- from capturing good solutions, to matching in terms of demand and supply followed by supporting replication will eventually question the existence of the crowdsourcing platform.

Running a successful crowdsourcing platform for global development solutions may seem to be an uphill task for a single initiator/institution. Joining hands and partnering with multiple institution is the key to deliver real impact on the ground. Instead of multiple platforms, funded by various organizations, it would be ideal to have a few platforms backed by sufficient amount of financing and technical assistance to support replication/scaling up of good, implemented solutions.

Question is- how to bring different organizations under one platform for a common cause and how to coordinate various activities and share accountabilities? Who to lead and how long?

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Ready to tap into the wisdom of crowd?

Knowledge is dispersed. There is no reasons to believe that an organization has all the knowledge and expertise to solve their current and future challenges. In a super volatile world with extreme pressure to change and innovate, every organization now have to fast forward their ideas generation and innovation activities. The need to go beyond the organizational boundary and tap into the expertise of others is crucial to survive. But it is also not an easy task, specially to attract the right people and client to contribute innovative and impactful ideas and keep their motivation level high for on going knowledge sharing.

?How to start the crowdsourcing exercise then?

?-????????Start small and focus on specific outcome- ?The theme and the ‘ask’ for new ideas have to be focused. People need to know what exactly the problem is that the organization is looking the solutions for. The more focused the problem/challenge is, the better the ideas will be generated by public.

?-????????Be serious about implementation – People will be engaged more with the ideas generation exercise when they see their suggestions get implemented. No one wants to throw ideas into a blackhole. Being their ideas implemented by the requesting organization will make them feel valuable and motivate them to contribute more in the future. A dedicated fund is needed to support the ideas implementation. Do not expect new products or services will emerge without spending enough financial and human resources.

?-????????Bring the idea author for co-creation- Once good ideas are selected through the crowdsourcing exercise, try to bring the ideas authors to be part of the implementation team. It is not always simple to do, as the ideas authors may not have the necessary skills to contribute in the implementation process. There are other technical factors involve to bring externals to join internal team, i.e. HR policies, labor laws, availability of the authors to provide full time or part time labor to another organization etc. But having the ideas generator to be part of the team can be very useful, specially if the authors are also the customers of the organization’s product or service.

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@Copyright: Naguib Chowdhury, 2022?