“There’s no doubt that the post-COVID-19 world will see major changes in the way organisations conduct business. The pandemic has showed us that we need to collaborate more, partner with diversified entities and be reactive to produce quicker results…”
To do so may require organisations to go beyond the usual boundaries and tap into the knowledge and wisdom of the ‘crowd’. Thus ‘crowdsourcing’ will become a new normal for many.
The history of crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing, though popular at present, first started more than 300 years ago, when the British government offered £20,000 for people to invent a solution to the Longitude problem which made sailing difficult, killing 1,000s of seamen every year. The contest was won by John Harrison, the son of a carpenter.
Many global companies now use crowdsourcing to solicit ideas and insights from the public. Mostly used for innovation, crowdsourcing aims to obtain ideas and solutions from external individuals to solve a specific problem.
Crowdsourcing in action within global firms
Toyota launched a crowdsourcing competition back in 1936 to redesign its logo. Starbucks has a more organised, ongoing campaign, called My Starbucks Idea, which gathers ideas from its customers for better quality products and services. The platform allows everyone to view ideas submitted by others and rate them based on individual preferences. There is also a public leaderboard that displays the most dedicated fans, and the most popular ideas. The key success factors to Starbucks’ ideation platform is its commitment towards implementing feasible ideas of its customers. The implementation rate is around 10% and that drives the public to contribute their thoughts on a regular basis.
However, it is not just commercial companies that benefit from crowdsourcing. Governments around the world have also been using it to engage with citizens.
Crowdsourcing by the Governments
The Obama administration in 2010 launched Challenge.gov, an online platform that engages the public in solving issues facing federal agencies. The platform allows agencies to create challenges, review proposals from the public, and then award prizes to the best proposal(s). The portal is still active and many agencies are using it.
Many city municipalities also use crowdsourcing platforms to collect information and feedback from the residents. The Municipality of Dushanbe (the capital of Tajikistan) used an online platform to collect public reporting of various issues that the city had been facing, i.e. water shortage, pathway holes, drainage problems etc.
Crowdsoucing can also have an internal dimension, where organisations can tap into the collective intelligence of all staff members.
Internal Crowdsourcing
AirAsia- the low-cost airline of Malaysia, has a “BRAIN” program, where an internal crowdsourcing platform invites employees to submit ideas on how to improve AirAsia’s operations. Employees are given the opportunity to contribute, comment and vote for ideas.
IBM’s “Innovation Jam” was the largest IBM online brainstorming session with 150,000 employees from 104 countries and 67 companies. During that session, 46,000 ideas were produced and 10 new IBM businesses were launched with seed investment totaling US$100mil.
While crowdsourcing focuses a lot on generating new ideas, can the same concept be used to explore and identify already implemented solutions to solve a problem?
Crowdsourcing Knowledge and Solutions
The Global Innovation Exchange platform created by USAID, AusAID, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among others, helps to scale up the most promising global development innovations by connecting innovators, funding and insights. The platform targets social entrepreneurs in low-and-middle-income countries and provides credible innovation data for the international development community and other ecosystem players. It also provides an opportunity for the innovators to connect with fellow innovators to co-create solutions.
Development Asia, a platform initiated recently by the Asian Development Bank, invites institutions to share development experiences, expertise and best practices to address sustainable development goals. The platform provides an opportunity to interact with experts, policy makers and other practitioners in related fields. The solutions featured on the platform are practical, how-to solutions, technology applications and policy studies and they come from various partners of the bank, including its own projects.
Crowdsourcing for knowledge management
Creating a knowledge platform with already implemented, successful development solutions and then passing those to the people/institutions/countries who need them to is a noble idea; but to practically implement such a match-making may not be that simple. Why?
1. How would we collect the successful stories?
No single database currently exists that lists all of the implemented and successful solutions in various fields. Many of the solutions are implemented at community level where no proper knowledge capture was conducted. Other solutions originated by institutions fall into the dilemma of IP protection/institutional property and thus labelled as ‘not shareable’.
2. How would we motivate individuals/institutions to share?
Some of the crowdsourcing platforms promote that any participating solutions providers will get wider global community attention; providers will be noticed by funders or others in the ecosystem who would like to replicate their model. Such a promise might be quite far from the reality.
Platform organisers need to continuously engage with various actors in the ecosystem to replicate/scale up the solutions, provide some sort of seed funding and technical assistance to both the supply and the demand side. Having all these elements together with the online platform requires proper allocation of resources (financial and human) in order to keep the momentum alive.
3. What else is needed to keep the interest level high?
In order to keep people and institutions contributing and engaging in deeper conversations on the platform, regular interventions are needed. This may include- organising annual events with select knowledge and solutions providers, holding online competitions offering incentives and featuring providers in other popular platforms.
4. What does it take to deliver a successful intervention?
If we think of knowledge exchange or replicating a solution from one organisation/country to another, several elements need to be in place.
First, we need to find ‘the demand’ side – a country/organisation willing to learn from the solution. We then need to organise a communication session that may trigger a feasibility study. Several issues might arise here, for example, the receiving organisation/country’s ability to replicate the solution in terms of finance and people capacity.
Think about this scenario, an innovative solution to improving soil fertility requires technical knowledge of the recipient country’s relevant authorities, farmers etc. If the technical knowledge is missing, a knowledge transfer programme should be designed – both time and budget consuming. How many platforms will provide such packages (not only the online system but also the technical assistance wrapped with financing) to the solutions providers?
Considering the above four points, running a successful crowdsourcing platform may seem an uphill task for any single institution. Instead of many platforms, funded by various organisations, it could instead be ideal to have only a few platforms backed by a good amount of financing and technical assistance to support knowledge exchange and replication/scaling up of implemented solutions.
Whatever the solution, the world now more than ever, needs wider and greater collaboration to solve our pressing challenges.
* This post first appeared in KM Insight on May 7, 2020
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Senior Knowledge Management Specialist
