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.
2 comments:
Interesting post Jon. One of my project teams is using a site called Crowdspring to crowdsource a logo design for our product. We've been able to get a wide variety of submissions that we're fairly excited about. I think this works fairly well when you have a relatively short design brief. People can quickly make a logo using the prompt and could potentially win a sum of cash. So each person or group entering these crowdsourced competitions has to do a a risk calculation about how likely they believe they are to win and how good of a solution can they design. One of the major advantages is that you get much more variety in the solution submissions because you have a broader group working on it who are not being influenced by a corporate structure or each other. The interesting thing is that the competition appeals to people's pride, so you often end up getting a lot of great submissions at low risk. I think crowdsourcing is limited though because many people can not take on the risks of larger projects that consultancies are able to take. Also, I think there is some security of using a large consultancy because they have a large portfolio or projects.
nicholas
You hit on some important points. Crowdsourcing is great for community building and having new "eyes" on a project. I'm curious to see how co-creating can change a product's design and the overall user experience. I found some interesting examples online: http://www.openinnovators.net/list-open-innovation-crowdsourcing-examples/
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