Crowdsourcing Innovations and Product Development - Free R&D Strategy

Finding new and cost effective methods for developing new products and innovations for your company is not easy. It involves time, energy, effort and cash. However, a new process for innovating for small business is quickly gaining in popularity. It is called "crowdsourcing."

What Is Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing, as its name indicates, is the utilization of crowds to help you develop ideas for your company. Crowdsourcing utilizes social networking sites and strategies to gain insights into what people are buying, what they are not buying and what they need. Crowdsourcing can also be used as a method for developing and testing products. Again the use of social networking sites is pivotal to this process.

How to Crowdsource

In order to take advantage of the free innovative benefits offered by crowdsourcing the company will need to have a presence online. This presence will need to include social network pages. It is a good idea to create a page and profile on the top three or four social networking sites. It is also a good idea to focus social networking efforts on industry specific social networking sites as well.

The next step is to develop your social network. This is done by having people become your friend or to subscribe to your news feed or twitter feed. There are several ways to do this. The best option is to simply advertise your social networking pages on your main website. You can also take out ad space on the social networking sites that you are targeting to tell people that you are a part of the network and that you want people to become your company's "friend."

Step three is to get people talking about the products, services or other business issues you need to work on. For example, you can start a discussion about a particular product that your company offers that you want to upgrade or modify. You can bait discussions by posting a question on your page and asking for responses and opinions. You can also produce a multiple choice quiz for your network to take. This quiz can be designed to help you figure out what features are most desirable and which ones your products can do without.

Tips for Crowdsourcing

1. In order for crowdsourcing to be effective you need to remain dedicated to its procurement. This means that you not only need to keep the conversations going on your social networking site, but you also need to start new conversations and direct conversations as you go.

2. Respond to negative comments so that you can redirect the conversation to something positive.

3. Pay attention to the conversations and organize the responses that you get. This information is very valuable and can be used for the development of marketing, products and business innovations.

References

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html