Innovation and crowdsourcing
The European Commission under the lead of the Directorate General for Education and Culture in association with the Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry have named this year as the “Creativity and Innovation European Year”. This initiative is not unknown for the Basque society as 2008 was named as the “Innovation Year” in the Basque Country.
So it’s obvious that the main area of concern nowadays is innovation, as the main source of competitive advantage. With the arising of new emerging economies, the business world is turning into an era of extreme competition where the only way to succeed is to innovate. That is exactly one of the building blocks of the Lisbon Strategy set up by the European Commission back in 2005, innovation as the motor of business change.
Three types of innovations can be distinguished nowadays: business model innovation, operational innovation and product or service innovation. In order to innovate in any of these areas an organization has traditionally relied on internal R&D or innovation units. However, with the advent of the social Web, unprecedented collaborative power is at the hands of Web users allowing them to participate in different kinds of projects.
The motivation behind user participation can vary but this phenomenon, coined as crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe, has given birth to well-known initiatives like Wikipedia or Linux (previous to Web 2.0 boom) and has allowed various organizations (e.g.: Procter & Gamble, IBM, Air Products,…) redefine and accommodate their business models and value propositions to customers’ needs in a way nobody had been able to do it before. Crowdsourcing can involve different stakeholders and be leveraged in different ways but from an organization’s perspective the final result can be measured in terms of innovative products, improved processes or even new business models that benefit both the company and its customers. In the following days we’ll introduce several case studies to illustrate this issue.
