Crowdsourcing

spacer What is crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. Users (also known as the crowd) typically form into online communities, and the crowd submits solutions. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place–the crowdsourcer–and the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded. In some cases, this labor is well compensated, either monetarily, with prizes, or with recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization.

Can you use IdeaScale for crowdsourcing?

You can use IdeaScale to create your own crowdsourcing community quickly and easily. Its a simple turn-key solution that allows for the submission of simple or complex solutions and the vetting and sorting of ideas so that the best ideas bubble up to the top.

Although IdeaScale is used for the front-end of crowdsourcing including the gathering and building on promising ideas, it also has numerous back-end features that help stakeholders and administrators find ways of taking the work that is generated by the crowd and making it a reality in business, education, government, and more.

IdeaScale has been used to gather ideas from the crowd for numerous purposes including new product development, product refinement programs, cost savings ideas, citizen engagement initiatives, citizen journalism programs, customer feedback, challenge-specific work and more. How you use Ideascale depends on your goals and the work that you would like to complete using crowdsourcing.