Managing Digital Crowds

March 21, 2017

Read The Full Prompt

In this module we have examined how firms can leverage digital technologies to harness the power of collective intelligence from the crowds to tackle a range of problems such as innovation problems and funding startups. For this assignment you have three options:

1 – Pick one industry where no firms have leveraged crowds, and come up with a crowd-based business model that may potentially transform the industry. Describe how you plan to create and capture value. Explain why the crowd will participate, and why your crowd-based model is better than the current model employed by the incumbents.

2 – Describe a company that is using crowds (external or internal) in an innovative manner. Describe how they incentivize participation and manage the crowd. What are the challenges? Describe how value creation and value capture occur, and the growth potential of this business.

3 – Companies often struggle with crowds as well. Describe failed crowdsourcing efforts and explain how and why the company failed. Given what you have learned in the course, what would you do differently?

Create an approximately 500-750 word post to make your contribution by 6pm on March 20. Please create appropriate tags for your post. Please also respond to and comment on three other posts per module. Feel free to use graphics, data, videos and links to other sites to corroborate your points.

Please prepare a two minute pitch about your blog entry before the class.

Submitted (92)

SpotAngels – Using crowds to solve the car parking problem.
AC
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 5:55 pm
SpotAngels is a San-Francisco based start-up founded in 2014 and a graduate of Y-Combinator summer 2014 batch. The company focuses on solving the car parking problem. While it is still at its early stage, SpotAngels is developing an innovative way [...]
[Option 2] Glassdoor: Rant about your boss AND help the community
YuvalG
Last modified on March 14, 2017 at 3:16 pm
What started as a place for disgruntled employees to share their frustrations with the people upstairs anonymously, quickly became a money-making machine.
Quora – Crowdsourcing human knowledge
Anish Nahar
Posted on March 20, 2017 at 4:57 pm
How Quora become the #140 most visited website in the world by leveraging human instincts around helping others and getting recognized.
Wikipedia – The Free Encyclopedia
Mohit Mittal
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 10:46 pm
With over 40M articles and 15 billion page views, Wikipedia is the fifth-most popular website in the world. With an editorial community of 75,000, Wikipedia has maintained a hierarchical structure to ensure the quality of content. Managed by a non-profit [...]
CrowdMed: Solving medical puzzles
opheliac
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 4:39 pm
CrowdMed: helping patients to get closer the right diagnosis.
23andMe: Healing the World through Crowdsourcing
Ali
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 4:52 pm
Biotech firm 23andMe used crowdsourcing to collect vast body of data and fuel first-of-a-kind depression study
Equity investing for the masses: Is Indiegogo killing VCs?
LiDe
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 7:47 pm
Crowdfunding has been gaining more hype – especially in the last year since new regulation was passed allowing anyone in America to own shares of a private company. What does that mean for VCs? Why is Indiegogo positioned to win [...]
Glossier: “What’s Your Dream Face Wash?”
LuluQ
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 6:11 pm
Beauty products for the crowd by the crowd.
TayTweets with Trolls: Microsoft Research’s Painful Lesson in Conversation Crowdsourcing
Micah
Last modified on March 17, 2017 at 9:10 pm
In March 2016, Microsoft launched Tay, a Twitter bot that could learn from its conversations with others. The experiment quickly unraveled.
The Travel Industry Should Be More “Crowded”
Tyler
Posted on March 20, 2017 at 4:42 pm
Accommodations platforms can leverage their already existing networks to create useful information and strengthen their communities and offerings.
Slickdeals – Monetizing frugality
Yun Yu
Last modified on March 16, 2017 at 8:13 pm
Have you ever bought something online and felt really pleased with yourself, only to find out shortly afterwards that you overpaid by 20%? Suddenly that new pair of shoes you were looking forward to, is now just a constant reminder [...]
DeNA Case: Failure of HBS Alumna
Tomo Nakagawa
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 4:48 pm
Risk of crowd sourced information
Tay: Crowdsourcing a PR Nightmare
So Many Cranberries
Last modified on March 18, 2017 at 2:58 pm
“We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay.” [1]
Using the Power of Crowds to Answer “What Should We Do Tonight?”
kwei
Posted on March 20, 2017 at 5:43 pm
Leveraging the real-time data from crowds to make the best of the day and night
Gym Rat: Crowdsourcing Personal Trainers
Ravneet Uberoi
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 9:43 pm
Why pay for expensive personal trainers when you can leverage gym rats in your neighborhood? Here's a business idea to use crowdsourcing in the gym industry.
How Dinner Lab’s Attempt to Crowdsource Restaurant Concepts Got Roasted
Christy
Posted on March 20, 2017 at 11:30 pm
Founded in 2012, Dinner Lab was an innovative startup that raised over $10 million in funding, gained over 150,000 members, and had a presence in almost 30 cities.[1] Despite this tremendous growth and demonstrated consumer interest, the company abruptly shut [...]
Vetr: Crowdsourcing Stock Ratings
James Baird
Posted on March 16, 2017 at 9:04 pm
Can crowds do better than sophisticated analysts when it comes to predicting future stock prices?
TripAdvisor’s FlyScore: Not yet harnessing the power of crowds
James
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 5:52 pm
By improving their FlyScore tool, TripAdvisor could harness the power of the crowd to help buyers make better decisions about which airlines to fly with.
Codeacademy: Crowdsourcing Code Tutorials
Rahul
Posted on March 20, 2017 at 5:07 pm
Codeacademy: An online platform that provides free coding tutorials, a third of which are created by the people for the people.
Reddit: Managing the “Front Page of the Internet”
michellebrous
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 8:52 pm
A deep dive into the most engaged online community in the world.
Kaggle: the data scientists hub
Jing
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 7:07 pm
If you want to become a data scientist, you need to be a part of the Kaggle community!
ArcBazar: Crowdsourcing Design
boris
Posted on March 20, 2017 at 11:59 pm
The worst thing to happen to architecture?
Iodine: the ‘Yelp of Medicine’
SonaliBloom
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 4:58 pm
Iodine is the ‘Yelp of Medicine,’ creating tremendous value by crowdsourcing reviews of pharmaceuticals to help patients make better-informed choices about their medications. But the question remains: can they capture any of that value?
IndieGoGo: Supply and Demand -> Demand and Supply
Noorin D
Posted on March 20, 2017 at 5:49 pm
How IndieGoGo is redefining the interaction between supply and demand to revolutionize the way that ideas are funded
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