Today, we’re taking a look at the organizations using crowdsourcing to solve really knotty problems. Crowdsourcing has been disappointing when used for projects like My Starbucks Idea and Dell IdeaStorm. Customers were invited to submit their solutions to product problems, and vote for the best ideas. The companies implement the best ideas, hopefully saving time and money. But in both cases, customers tend to suggest little changes. For example, My Starbucks Idea led to the creation of Splash Sticks, reusable sticks to stop up that little hole in the lid and prevent splashes. Right now, the people on Dell IdeaStorm are pushing for a slightly different screen ratio to facilitate reading documents. Adjustments like these do please consumers, but they’re a long way away from the game-changing innovation Starbucks and Dell might have hoped for. Only a tiny percentage of the proposed ideas have proved useful. But as Steve Jobs said in 1998 “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Average customers aren’t computer technicians or retail gurus, and they don’t understand how businesses work. You need a high-quality crowd to produce a good result.

Interestingly, we’re seeing a lot of successful free crowdsourcing in the scientific realm. You’ve probably heard about how video gamers solved the folding pattern of a protein. Scientists at the University of Washington made the process of deduction into a game, and the resulting model will help with AIDS research. This is volunteer crowdsourcing, whereby many people donate small amounts of time and effort to grind through mammoth tasks – like cataloguing enormous quantities of data. In this way amateurs have helped professional scientists categorize photos of galaxies and annotate images of TB cells.

Crowdsourced volunteering has helped research into the ancient world. In the 19^th century, British archaeologists discovered a stunningly well-preserved rubbish dump in Egypt near the city of Oxyrhynchus. Because of extreme dryness, half a million pieces of papyrus had survived more than a millennium. Unfortunately, transcribing the hand-written and fragmented papyri was time-consuming. After decades of work, Oxford crowdsourced the labour on a site called Ancient Lives. Visitors help with the transcription by measuring fragments’ margins and marking and identifying letters. They don’t need to understand Ancient Greek, they just match the handwriting with images of letters. So far, participants have transcribed over four million documents for translation. They’ve found lost comedies, legal documents and lyric poetry.

We see how crowdsourcing can be an effective way to tackle tasks that require time rather than expertise. But it’s also possible to crowdsource genuine scientific breakthrough using sites like InnoCentive.com. InnoCentive works like the Creative Services Exchange, supplying scientific innovation rather than creative ideas. Corporations, government agencies and research institutions all submit their thorny scientific problems to the site. Bright, qualified ‘solvers’ read them and brainstorm solutions. Right now, the Consumer Electronics Association is looking for a way to recycle cathode ray tube glass and the BeyondPolio initiative wants to lower polio vaccine costs. They pose their questions to a high-quality crowd of Solvers and offer a monetary reward to whoever solves their problem. Take a look at the ‘I’m a Solver’ series on the blog to get an idea of the crowd calibre and read some success stories. Good money and tricky challenges attract bright minds and innovative ideas. We call this model crowdsourcing 2.0.

Dell and Starbucks went wrong because they used the volunteer crowdsourcing method. They had a low-quality crowd made up of their customers and no monetary incentive to encourage serious thought. Their crowdsourcing didn’t turn up the next big thing, but it did make the companies appear customer-friendly, so they weren’t a dead loss. To find a really innovative idea, they should have crowdsourced the blur way.

Of course, it’s not too late for you! We’ll get you top-notch creative thinking at a better price than going directly to an agency. Brief the Exchange today.