CREATIVE SME 2009 -Crowdsourcing Strategy to extend the innovation capabilitie of SMEs

21-jun-2009
Panel: It was a very dynamic panel and finished after the planned time.
Prof. Carl Adams (University of Portsmouth-UK) and Isabel Ramos (University of Minho - PT) presented the first panel.
At first Carl Adams began making a joke showing us two boxes and asking to guess how many sweets in each box and to write the answer on a paper. Each guess tried to answer how many sweets are there in each box.
After this exercise he asked guess what was and is crowdsourcing?
First he said that is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor and outsourcing and that Wikipedia is a good example of crowdsourcing (mass community). He said that Jeff Howe - a US journalist -presented the term in 2006 but in 2004 James Surowuecki´s wrote the book “The wisdom of Crowds” and he suggest three types of problems that crowds can address: cognition, coordination and cooperation. So he talked about other fields (biology and swarm intelligence) and gave several examples. So he did a crowdsourcing task for all guess:
The task was to design a Lego brick toy using the least amount of bricks but appealing to the most amount of people. After the sessions he asked what are the motivations for participating and would it work?
We think that´s an interesting way to discuss the crowdsourcing concepts. After Prof Isabel Ramos integrated the concepts and presented the ways to apply the strategy: Internaly identifying problems and needs of innovation or by placing to a brokering service. She said tha globalization theories and practice indicate a smaller number of larger, multinational corporations…there is a need for innovation and much innovation take place in SMEs; tapping into a vast resource of human capital. Virtual communities are hug – 200 M is 10 times larger than the largest….She also speaks about the potential for SMEs and the benefits of intermediaries brokers. Bridging two value systems: the challenges . Academy and industry, the support mechanisms and critical comments. Dol theories indicate difference between early and later adopters: will crowdsourcing be a long term business model? Still need some incentives, there is no long term business without income; there are challenges in parceling up the tasks and collating the responses.
The future of crowdsourcing: the evolution of crowdsourcinng intermediaries effectiviely re-intermediation of the value and supply/demand chains
IPR based incentive mechanisms, micropayment and microIP mechanisms – sharing IPR
The emergence of new organizational structures – a new dimension in virtual transient organizations (temporal-transient crowds (TTCs)/outsourcing groups and Micro IP systems for TTCs.
Different flavors characterized by incentives and motivations.
The panel finished with these questions:
What are the challenges? What are the research questions we should be asking? Is there a manifesto for crowdsourcing (that can inform policy)?
What are the contributions by individuals – motivation of the crowds and economics benefits?