The topic of crowdsourcing is still relatively new to me, and in order to understand it a bit better I really wanted to aggregate all the knowledge about crowdsourcing across the web. So last week I wrote a Friday Fact Box on crowdsourcing, where I analyzed the extent to which crowdsourcing has become a viable tool in a brands arsenal - once more I was interested to find out where crowdsourcing was being applied across various market categories. To do this I decided to focus a PBworks Wiki which has a comprehensive list of crowdsourcing examples.
For today’s post I am going to extract some of the graphs I created for this analysis and provide examples of businesses, websites and initiatives who are applying crowdsourcing.
Individual Businesses and Websites that use Crowdsourcing:
As you can see, ‘general business’ makes up the largest industry which has used, and continues to use, crowdsourcing. Out of the 141 listed companies/sponsors there are 61 which fit into this general category. Now obviously this is vague; I mean anything can really fit into a ‘general business’ category, so let me provide some cool examples.
General Business
This platform is focused on advertising and video production and is targeted towards all filmmakers (amateurs or professionals), students, directors, bloggers, vloggers and all those alike.
Freerisk is a project with the goal of making freely available the data, algorithms and tools necessary to perform financial modeling.
Colspark is a platform that brings companies and students together that are interested in sales, marketing and advertising. Students suggest fresh ideas and solutions to real-world problems, differentiating themselves to potential employers who can tap into their fresh and creative minds.
JuJups is a personalized gift platform where users can personalize mugs, frames, watches and t-shirts (to name a few!).
Design & Creative
Design and creative make up 15% of crowdsourced initiatives that are active. Here are a couple of great examples:
With all of the above examples the idea is that thousands of designers compete to create the best possible design for a client’s needs. Designs range from logos, web pages, print, graphic and merchandise.
This is a net store where a user can design fabrics. If the design is a success – based on the votes of the user - it will be sold on the site.
Like the above sites, Pim Tim allows creatives to design for a range of business needs, including graphics, banners, badges, stickers, ads etc!
Fashion
There are many platforms dedicated towards the fashion world – here are some really creative, inspiring and funky examples:
This is a straight-forward online fashion store and crowd-funding site. Users can buy directly from designers, get educated on fashion as well as support the industry by backing young designers.
This is an online community where shoe lovers come together to create, buy, and talk about printed high heels and pumps.
A crowdsourced t-shirt platform along the lines of Threadless.
Like Dream Heels, this open source footwear website allows anyone to design a cool shoe. Once the design is submitted, it gets put forward to the public domain that ‘edit’ the design (either drawing inspiration from parts of it or simply taking the whole thing) before it is put to a vote to determine whether it is a winner or not.
This is a cool on-demand retail platform for consumers and major brands, offering billions of retail quality, one-of-a-kind products. Customisable products range from t-shirts, shoes, bags mugs, postage, cards etc.
This platform allows anyone to create high quality products from patterns submitted and chosen by the brand’s audience. Like others, the success of the design is determined by a voting system.
Big Brand Players
There are a few hundred examples and I could go on forever… To avoid making this the longest post in the history of the Idea Bounty blog, let me end off by providing examples of big brand players who have embraced the power of crowdsourcing.
BMW used crowdsourcing to innovate on and improve their telematics, online services and driver assistance systems.
In the spirit of democracy, anyone is invited to throw around ideas to help Mountain Dew create a new flavor for their soft-drink range.
Here, your average Joe can become an engineer (if they have the skills of course!) by sharing and voting on future concepts and designs for the Nokia brand.
Lego have created an International LEGO Users Group Network, which is a global community of LEGO enthusiasts. There are forums, web pages, and services.
Users can get stuck in with online “brainstorm” sessions to share ideas and collaborate with one another and Dell. This is for new product and service development.
