Prediction 1 for 2012: Crowdsourcing Outshines Innovation and Jobs Issue Takes a New Turn

Crowdsourcing will become top of mind for most companies as 2011 turns into 2012. We will hear less about innovation and more about how to fix things in the public sector, how to turn wages into prizes in enterprise operations, and how to build challenges in design, product renewal and in big tech and science.

Crowdsourcing is entering maturity with a culture that is distinct from the innovation game. Whereas the innovation community engages in plenty of discussion but too little method, crowdsourcers go straight to the fridge and take what they want. Here are some of the reasons why it will be big in 2012 – and some of the implications.

Reasons:

• Crowdsourcing players have built a reasonable and growing communications in infrastructure for the topic. Media sites like crowdsourcing.org, currently in a redesign phase are not only attracting visitors, they are also sponsoring in-depth research on issues like – how do you do crowdsourcing for routine processes and for creative tasks in the enterprise.
• The industry is beginning to band together to promote understanding, process and messaging, something the innovation industry has consistently failed to do – seecrowdsortium.org - even to the point of creating an industry code of conduct.
• Companies have a tough time with innovation – the online conversation around innovation sets the bar at unreachable heights: Can you do what Apple and Salesforce.com do? Most companies will never be Apple and wonder what the learnings are, for them, from Jobs and Co.  If the only criterion for innovation is the iPhone or Salesforce.com’s chatter your are bound to disappoint.
• Companies have money to spend and don’t know what to spend it on – out of fear they are looking for fail-safe options  and crowdsourcing will give them that.
• Many companies will reach for familiar weapons like cost  reduction. Cost reduction seemed to have hit a wall with the current recession. Surely no more more cost can be taken out of the enterprise. Well with crowdsourcing it more than likely can.

Implications:

• More opportunities for cost cutting – of course, the obvious implication and one that companies know they MUST chase down at the slightest sign of a promise
• More routinisation of work – companies will have to re-examine processes to see what can be routinized and outsourced to the crowd
• More need for novel ways to improve performance within crowd projects – we still need deeper understanding of how the crowd can deliver better, given there isn’t much in the way of metrics of how crowds deliver in normal circumstances, so here again metrics are important
• More power to gamification. We’re moving uncomfortably fast towards the gamified worldview. There’s good and bad in it but very little serious debate. Crowds are motivated by game mechanics.
• And more power to the challenge based economy, raised by Bingham and Spradlin in their recent book, because when a crowd-sourced project is not a game, it defaults to a challenge.

The rise of crowd-sourcing is irresistible. It plays into companies’ big needs and it is low hanging fruit. It segues well with the gamification meme and with the sense of challenge around us. It will satisfy the need for a year of breakthroughs rather than stalemate and frustration, the mod of 2011.

What we need to do though is get the debate going quickly – what do we really think of gamifying as much work as possible, the possibility that more tasks will go offshore, the reductionism involved, and the conversion of wages to prizes?

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