In light of our recent class readings in supplier relationships and sourcing, I felt like talking about crowdsourcing. (Shoutout to Skyrien for getting me thinking about this with his own post last month) How is crowdsourcing similar to outsourcing, and how is it different?
The most obvious similarity between the two is the huge cost-reducing potential of both crowdsourcing and outsourcing when compared to doing things in-house or through a consultancy. However, with outsourcing many companies lose out in the end by outsourcing core competencies and giving away their source of competitive advantage. With crowdsourcing, unless a company was using in-house design before, there's seemingly no competitive advantage lost vs using a consultancy.
What advantages can a consultancy have over the freelancer? Certainly, resources -- capacity to work on larger projects is probably also a factor. If a company is going to be establishing a long-term relationship with a designer to keep its design language consistent, a consultancy is arguably more consistent. Is this enough to keep consultancies safe? Will other areas of consulting fall to crowdsourcing as well? It certainly seems like there is an oversupply of MBA graduates -- why has strategic consulting not been crowdsourced yet?
In the end, I think -- and this applies to design consulting as well -- the main crowdsourced elements are the technical design skills, not the actual design process or strategy. Design strategy and implementation is probably something consultancies still have an advantage in, as seen by the continued success of IDEO, which may not come up with the snazziest renderings but focus on applying the design process to identify opportunity areas.
