Open Innovation Crowdsourcing Challenges: Leveraging the Power of the Masses

The power of the crowd is increasingly being recognized as a potent tool in problem-solving and innovation. Open innovation, as facilitated through crowdsourcing challenges, provides a pathway for businesses to tap into the collective intelligence and expertise of a diverse group of individuals and companies, transcending traditional company borders.

This article explores how businesses can leverage crowdsourcing platforms to generate innovative ideas, engage solver communities, and overcome common business challenges. It also includes real-world examples of crowdsourcing campaigns that have driven business success.

What is crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining innovative solutions, services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and businesses, rather than relying solely on internal employees or suppliers. This approach harnesses the power of crowdsourcing to generate new solutions quickly, efficiently, and often in a more cost-effective strategy.

Business challenges addressed by crowdsourcing

Businesses face numerous challenges, and crowdsourcing techniques can provide effective ways to solve them. Here are some key areas where crowdsourcing innovation can be applied:

• Problem solving: Tackle specific technical challenges by allowing the crowd to propose innovative solutions.
• Product development: 
  Generate product ideas and enhance existing products through idea generation.
• Business development: Identify new business and technology fields. Scout for matching candidates to collaborate with or new technology partners. 
• Market research: Gathering data and opinions from a broad audience about market trends, customer preferences, etc.
• Content creation: Engage the crowd in producing great ideas for marketing, writing, and design.
• Funding: Crowdfunding campaigns can help pre-sell innovative products or raise capital in the early stages.

Crowdsourcing innovation and internal challenges

While internal innovation is valuable and based on deep company knowledge, crowdsourcing offers several advantages:

• Diversity of Thought: Crowdsourcing draws from a diverse global pool, bringing new solutions, varied perspectives, and experiences.
• Spot Innovation Blind Spots: Solutions from the outside help to identify blind spots in internal innovation search areas, processes, and more.
• Cost Efficiency: Often, only the best idea submissions are rewarded in crowdsourcing, making it cost-effective.
• Risk Diversification: Multiple solutions can be explored simultaneously.
• Speed: A large crowd might provide solutions faster than a limited internal team.

However, potential downsides of crowdsourcing campaigns need to be addressed:

• Loss of Intellectual Property (IP) Control: Sharing problems or projects with the public might expose a company's IP to potential theft or imitation. There's a risk that competitors might pick up on the ideas shared. Adequate protection has to be put in place.
• Confidentiality Issues: Revealing certain challenges or seeking solutions publicly can inadvertently disclose company strategies, weaknesses, or plans. In some cases, it may be better to not reveal the company's name and scout solutions anonymously.
• Quality Control: The diverse pool of contributions can vary greatly in quality. Sifting through numerous submissions to find viable solutions can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. This can be addressed by a set of clearly defined criteria that a contribution/solution has to fulfill.
• Dependence on External Motivation: Crowdsourcing sometimes relies on external motivations (like monetary rewards, recognition, or prizes) to engage participants. Incentives have to be seen as valuable.
• Company Culture and Values: External contributors might not have a deep understanding of the company's culture, values, and long-term goals. Solutions have to be screened so that they don´t clash with the company's ethos or brand image.
• Integration Challenges: Even if an external solution is brilliant, integrating it into existing company processes, systems, workflows, timelines, or products can be challenging. Innovation management processes can be set up in a way to address the most common integration challenges.
• Employee Morale: Relying frequently on external sources for innovation may demotivate internal teams. It is vital to give employees and teams an essential role in innovation management and value their contributions. This includes incentives and prizes for employee engagement, as well as involving them in evaluating external crowdsourced ideas.

While crowdsourcing can be a potent tool for innovation, companies need to address essential for companies to address the most common potential downsides. Depending on the context, a blended approach - leveraging both internal innovation and crowdsourcing - might be the most effective strategy.

How to engage a solver crowd for effective crowdsourcing

To maximize engagement and attract high-quality contributions, you need

• Clear Communication: Define the problem precisely and provide any necessary background. Use multimedia, templates, and PDFs. Define the Why and What. Make sure that individuals outside your organization understand what you are looking for and how they could contribute.
• Incentivization: Monetary rewards, recognition, or other incentives (e.g., joint pilot projects, collaboration values) can attract and motivate participants. Be very transparent about how the incentives work and who benefits.
• Communication Reach: Make sure you reach exactly the qualified crowd you are interested in with regard to their field of expertise, solutions, maturity (e.g., MVP), sector, and geography. External partners like Innovation World Cup® can provide this tailored reach.
• Platform Selection: Use a reliable and user-friendly platform. The software must be very user-friendly (in the front- and backend), easy to set up and configure, and of course, secure and reliable. Ideally, you can use your own branding or facilitate an existing online community like Innovation World Cup®. 
• Feedback Mechanism: Provide continuous feedback to participants, creating a two-way communication channel.
• Creating structured spaces for engagement: Effective communication and accessibility are key to any successful crowdsourcing campaign. ITONICS Sites provide a flexible environment to design dedicated pages, forms, or campaigns within the Innovation OS.
  
  
  

Exhibit 1: ITONICS Sites providing structured spaces for custom crowdsourcing 

These sites can be used to publish challenge briefs, collect submissions, or communicate updates to participants in a consistent and branded format. By enabling tailored communication and organized collaboration, Sites support transparency, participation, and a clear structure across internal and external innovation initiatives.

How to identify the best ideas in a crowdsourcing challenge

Selecting the most promising crowdsourced ideas structured evaluation methods: 

• Expert Panels: Assemble a panel of experts to evaluate submissions.
• Iterative Challenges: Allow participants to refine their ideas based on feedback.
• Prototyping: Convert ideas into tangible prototypes to test their viability.
• Peer Reviews: Let participants rate and review each other's contributions.

Crowdsourcing platform examples

Many companies have successfully used crowdsourcing platforms to drive business success. Here are some notable real-world examples:

• Lego Ideas: Allows fans to submit their own ideas for new LEGO sets. Successful ideas, chosen by both the crowd and the LEGO review board, get produced commercially.
• Innovation World Cup Series: International platform connecting techpreneurs (startups, scale-ups, small companies) and corporates successfully through innovation competitions with a global reach of up to +800.000 techpreneurs per sector. It acts as a catalyst for future innovations.
• Uplink from World Economic Forum: A platform connecting entrepreneurs and innovators to address global challenges. It matches innovative solutions with the resources needed to scale them.
• NASA's Tournament Lab: Collaborates with platforms like HeroX to solve specific challenges. Past challenges have ranged from predicting solar flares to 3D printing on Mars.
• Threadless: An online community of artists and an e-commerce website. Artists submit designs, the community votes, and the best designs are printed on apparel and other products.
• Zooniverse: The world's largest platform for people-powered research. Volunteers (known as citizen scientists) can assist professional researchers in everything from classifying galaxies to tracking giraffes in the wild. The data gathered helps scientists in various fields make breakthroughs faster.

Successful business crowdsourcing examples

• Netflix Prize: In 2006, Netflix announced a $1 million prize to anyone who could improve its movie recommendation system's accuracy by 10%. The competition attracted over 40,000 teams from around the world. The winning team, which combined the efforts of engineers and researchers, managed to achieve the goal, showcasing the power of diverse perspectives.
• LEGO Ideas: As mentioned earlier, LEGO Ideas is a platform where fans can submit their own designs for new LEGO sets. Successful designs that garner enough support are reviewed by LEGO, and some are produced as official sets. This approach not only engages the community but also sources fresh and innovative design ideas directly from the brand's most passionate fans.
• GE's Flight Quest Challenge: General Electric, in collaboration with Kaggle, launched a competition to improve flight efficiency. Participants were asked to develop algorithms that could reduce airline operational costs and increase efficiencies. The winning solutions provided ways to reduce flight delays and improve operational efficiency, leading to potential multi-million dollar savings.
• Bluetooth Innovation World Cup: Bluetooth SIG launched the Bluetooth Low Energy Standard in 2011. To establish an ecosystem and early adoption of the new standard, Bluetooth launched the open innovation program to create early-stage concepts in different verticals such as sports/fitness, healthcare, and industrial. Hundred thousands of developers and techpreneurs were reached, and hundreds of applications were submitted during the 3 years duration. The Innovation World Cup was a major means for Bluetooth SIG to establish the worldwide leading standard for low-power wireless transmission. Industrial partners like STMicroelectronics or Texas Instruments supported the developers with SDKs to train and adapt the new standard as fast as possible. Today´s success with shipments of more than 3 bio chips annually shows also the tremendous success of this open innovation program.
• Innovation World Cup Series: Organizations and Alliances such as ST Microelectronics, VARTA Microbattery, Google, Gore, Würth, Bluetooth SIG, or LoRa Alliance joined the Innovation World Cup® Series to solve their business challenges, foster their business development, and establish ecosystems based on new technologies. 
• Unilever's "Foundry IDEAS" Platform: Unilever launched this platform to address sustainability challenges faced by the company. By engaging with the global community, the company sourced solutions related to water conservation, sanitation, and sustainable sourcing. This initiative not only provided actionable solutions but also showcased Unilever's commitment to sustainability.
• Bosch Open Innovation Partnerships: Systematic open sourcing of innovative products, patents, and solutions that matched dedicated opportunity spaces and search fields within the Bosch universe. Combines crowdsourcing with internal innovation programs.

These examples highlight the vast potential of crowdsourcing as a tool for addressing significant business challenges. By tapping into diverse, global talent pools, companies can access innovative solutions, foster community engagement, and often achieve results faster and more cost-effectively than traditional methods.

Crowdsourcing software for open innovation

Crowdsourcing challenges offer a modern approach to problem-solving and innovation as they are breaking down traditional company boundaries and tapping into collective intelligence. Organizations that know how to effectively engage the crowd gain a real competitive advantage in today’s connected world.

With ITONICS, you can create flexible, branded environments for successful crowdsourcing campaigns. Using ITONICS external sites for tailored communication and structured collaboration, companies can build custom crowdsourcing portals that drive transparency, participation, and alignment across both internal and external innovation initiatives.