A recent article by Dr Paul Marsden in Contagious Magazine positions crowdsourcing as a recession proof strategy. The basic theory is that you get better informed product development and product enhancement with crowdsourcing, as well as better aligned supply and demand through online customer collaboration. The promise being that you can introduce your brand to 1000s and gain insight from subset of customers, that is fed into R&D and used in outbound marketing activities with a wider target group.
Put simply, many hands can make light work! But it’s worth bearing in mind that even James Surowiecki of Wisdom of Crowds fame clearly sets out the conditions in which he believes his theory applies. Surowiecki’s book title even alludes to the flipside of his theory, as explained way back in 1841 by Charles Mackay in his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. So put another way too many cooks spoil the broth and ZDNET commentator Dennis Howlett attempts to point out why in his Enterprise 2.0: what a crock piece from 2009:
“Communities are driven by passionate community evangelists. They don’t have an allegiance to the company or brand but to the idea of community. There’s nothing wrong with that but what happens when they move on or become tired of batting their head against a brick wall?’’
Perhaps this is why Penguin Books failed with their A Million Penquins collaborative effort to write a novel on a wiki platform, or at least as far as what we understand a novel to be now. The project also supports the 90-9-1 rule, which I’ll look at as part of the another post. But the failure might have more to do with a heavily promoted corporate sponsored project (B2C) being more susceptible to vandalism than a more open and collaborative one like the Linux kernel development process (C2C). However, even in the open development arena the struggle between top-down and bottom-up design has been understood for some time, as outlined in Eric S. Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar essay from 1997.
Interestingly, the literature review Dr Alain Samson at the LSE carried out as part of our research into collaborative innovation for NESTA suggests that successful radical innovation is more likely to occur in B2B collaborations where there’s innovation expertise across a range of business sectors. Consumers on the other hand are seemingly best involved in initiatives looking for more incremental or continuous innovation:
“B2C organisations typically have to evolve existing brands; where incremental innovation is less risky when it comes to retaining consumer loyalty; the potential dangers to existing brand share can make some B2C companies riskaverse.”
Some thought that this might not be because the quality of the original ideas are likely to be any better/worse in B2B versus B2C but because the collaboration partners have more resource and infrastructure to make them happen.
There were those that disagreed, but they tended to cite C2C (e.g. open source) rather than B2C collaboration examples:
“Napster, Dyson, Linux all come to mind”
“I think collaboration is a social phenomenon and there are likely to be as many if not more breakthroughs in a consumer environment.”
“Consumers are not constrained to business models or corporate ethos. They are driven by passion and online collaboration is a passion based
game.”“Listening to customers … one consults to frame innovation, not to engender it.”
Others thought that the Times They Are a-Changin:
“Historically has been the case … What is happening nowadays is that consumers find a use and leverage which is unexpected. Look at how consumers have used the internet … And I think the consumer will be making major changes, doing these major innovations over time. It may be that once the tools are in people’s hands that we are going to have a higher percentage of this from consumers and communities than we’ve ever had before.”
Maybe the key to any radical collaborative innovation that involves consumers might not be B2C, but for companies to leverage B2(C2C) innovation, whereby consumers frame and solve their own problems.
It’s also important for businesses to understand what barriers might prevent them from engaging in collaborative innovation with consumers and I plan to look at these next.
