Good old crowd

Last week, my team and I presented an interesting topic for #me1033 at KTH. The topic was about tightening the loop between the free innovation paradigm and the producer innovation paradigm.

An important part of this presentation was the use of crowdsourcing to get a grip on the free labor of the household sector innovators. A clear defenition of crowdsourcing is:

“the act of outsourcing a task to a ‘crowd’, rather than to a designated ‘agent’… in the form of an open call” – (Afuah and Tucci 2012, 355; Howe 2006).

It is about reaching individuals in a crowd to ask them for their time and resources to contribute to your project.

However, many of you might think that crowdsourcing is a thing of the present. And it is true that nowadays with the internet crowdsourcing has become far more easy and a much wider public could be reached. Crowdfunding and Kickstarter are important platforms nowadays to get to the crowd and ask for help. It is an easy way to get your idea out, get feedback on it, create a community around it and hopefully get funded so that you can start your new venture.

But actually crowdsourcing has been a thing of all times. Serdar gave me a great example about this. I do not remember his exact words, but it was something in this sense: ” If the people in a village wanted to have a trainrail passing through it, they would gather people from the village and build this rail together. As this was their mutual interest where they could all add something and benefit from it, they would do this for free.”

So what I want you to take away from this is that the topics we discuss in this course might seem all quite new and from the last years, but that we are often actually dealing with topics that have existed over a long time, we are just using them in different ways nowadays.

//Alessia