Pattern description

The solution of a task or problem is adopted by an anonymous crowd, typically via the Internet. Contributors receive a small reward or have the chance to win a prize if their solution is chosen for production or sale. Customer interaction and inclusion can foster a positive relationship with a company, and subsequently increase sales and revenue.

Inventive problems

Application examples

Threadless, a company founded in Chicago in 2000, has made online Crowdsourcing the core of its business, inviting designers from all over the world to submit T-shirt designs to its platform. Customers then vote on which models they like best. Threadless produces and markets the highest- rated T-shirts. The designers are rewarded financially if their work is chosen for production, and again if the work is reprinted or wins a competition. With this method, Threadless offers three to four new T-shirts per week that generally sell very well.

Procter & Gamble (P&G) is another company that successfully innovates using Crowdsourcing. At the beginning of the twenty-first century P&G found itself in a serious crisis, with stagnating revenues and skyrocketing research and development costs. To confront this predicament, the company introduced the ‘Connect + Develop’ Crowdsourcing programme, at the same time increasing the quota for the number of external ideas used in product development from 15 to 50 per cent. In order to achieve this ambitious goal, P&G created a huge network of external partners connecting its 9,000 researchers with more than 1.5 million scientists around the world. The Connect + Develop initiative allowed Procter & Gamble’s research division to increase its productivity by over 60 per cent within only five years.

References

The Business Model Navigator: 55 Models That Will Revolutionise Your Business