7 ways to improve your Idea Crowdsourcing and Collaboration Strategies

This is a recap of Forbes: The Future of Crowdsourcing, defining crowdsourcing as an open collaboration process intended to help solve problems, and we find this to be a straightforward definition that’s easy to understand. 

“Crowdsourcing offers an opportunity to bring together large groups of diverse individuals to solve problems with the assumption that diverse groups bringing a variety of opinions and backgrounds can make higher quality decisions than a small group of ‘experts.’” 

Throwing people into a room to brainstorm without any direction, strategy or intention isn’t how crowdsourcing should be done. The process needs as much finessing, organization, and clarity as possible to ensure that it’s effective and productive for all included. 

Plus, there are many things you can crowdsource around, like crowd creativity, crowd voting, crowd contests and challenges, and crowd innovation, to name some examples.

Technology is a crucial aspect in assessing how it can support receiving large amounts of data to find clues and patterns that people may miss. The strategy portion is also important when starting any crowdsourcing process to ensure that it can be more successful.

More Knowledge, Less Time

The Two Minute Takeaway

Here’s the key takeaways from @Forbes on how your can improve your Idea Crowdsourcing and Collaboration strategies:

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Why This Matters

“In a world where the challenges we face become increasingly complex, finding methods of bringing together crowds, experts, and technology in ways that facilitate creative and beneficial solutions presents exciting opportunities where a great many ‘laypeople’ can engage in activities that they enjoy while solving real-world challenges.”

Giving people a voice or at least a place to be included to vote on new ideas or solutions to problems truly helps people collaborate at much deeper levels. 

Feeling more valued is important to most humans and developing this kind of environment in an organization can be a way to create more trust amongst your people. And creating more trust means more collaboration can happen, so it can also mean more people want to engage. Crowdsourcing is integral in creating a speak-up culture, and in this type of environment, everyone wins. Here’s a great research recap with more insight on the speak-up culture topic.

Summary and Next Steps

Crowdsourcing is a powerful idea and solution-finding process that can enable all kinds of good things to blossom within your company, like deeper collaboration, more engagement, more trust amongst the people involved, and so much more. But there is a well-defined way that this should be done to ensure these efforts can be successful because throwing people into a room to brainstorm isn’t the right strategy (that’s a lack of strategy and won’t give you results you seek). 

Looking at technologies that can help you receive a lot more data and process new insights in an easier way is also extremely valuable. 

How can crowdsourcing empower your team, department, or company? 

Do you need more diverse perspectives and new ideas to solve some significant challenges that you’re hitting? 

(Maybe Swae can help you implement crowdsourcing! If you’re curious, see below to book a demo!)

Swae is helping organizations across the world to solve today’s problems and generate tomorrow’s strategy. Our clients are finding that their greatest resource is their people, and Swae is proven to help get the best from the untapped potential within their workforce. We’d love the chance to show you how Swae can ‘pay off’ for you…

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