Use the crowd, -in 2 ways!

Most recently I have had my eyes wide open for anything regarding entrepreneurship, ideas and almost everything related to this subject, and with reference to our lecture with Annika Lidne about Start Up funding in general and the blog post below about Crowdfunding, I would like to present a concept I stumbled upon this morning, Crowdsourcing.

Ok, so what is the difference between Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding? To make it simple we can state that when a group collects its resources to solve a problem = Crowdsourcing, and when a group collects its financial resources to make something happen = Crowdfunding. When expressing this, it is pretty obvious that both of these concepts must have been around for a while, even before the internet…Here is a quick history lesson:

One of the earliest examples of Crowdfunding was when Mozart proposed to his “fan base” to make the payments in advance for a concert, before everything was settled. This could be considered as groundbreaking and was followed by many other examples of a Crowdfunding like concept. This Mozart example occurred in the 18^th century and a few 100 years later the world saw another example of Crowdfunding, only in a slightly larger scale when the American government was helped by a publisher who asked inhabitants of New York for money to be able to build a great statue, today known as the statue of liberty. They raised 100k usd from NY residents in 1885 due insufficient funds from the government. (I would say that this is one of the most interesting examples of Crowdfunding due to the fact that a government asks citizens for funds to create something politically symbolic)

One of the first examples of Crowdsourcing is said to be when the British government needed a solution to determine longitude/latitude coordinates at sea, wherefore they went official with the problem and offered money to the one with the best solution. This is something that is used widely today, for example when companies are about to create a new slogan or logo, which Toyota actually already did in the 1930s. They got 27 000 different propositions and one can only imagine how many they would have received today!

                                  “Toyoda”

Now we know some history and as I stated before I stumbled upon something new today. -A way to use resources of dwellers on the internet, but not financially. -A way to create a logo with external help, much like Toyota did in the 1930s, but through a platform. If you want to create a logo by Crowdsourcing, you can just visit www.designcrowd.com to make it happen. Just write your specifications of the logo you have in mind, invest a few dollars and expect some cool contributions from the contesters from which you have to choose who deserves your money. Pretty cool idea actually and from what I have read this is something that has grown with the internet and today it is possible to use crowdsourcing for anyone who wants a logo, slogan or a problem solved. Today you do not need to be in a privileged position to ask a crowd for resources anymore, and I am sure that we will se some more succesfull business ideas based on crowdsourcing when the world has become even more digitalized. Maybe MOOCs can use crowdsourcing for creating best possible content? I really do believe that some people will make more and even greater business ideas out of these old concepts

Maybe crowdsourcing could be useful in someway for the marketplace game…