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)

Crowd Cow: How One Startup Is Innovating the Food Industry with Crowd-Sourcing
sijwang
Last modified on March 19, 2017 at 6:21 pm
Crowd-sourcing in the food industry? The idea seems preposterous, but a Seattle-based startup is trying to change that. Crowd Cow has created an online platform that allows foodies to purchase various cuts of premium beef with strangers on its website. Customers [...]
Innocentive: Outsourcing Innovation to a Network of Solvers
Lacy
Posted on March 20, 2017 at 5:57 pm
Innocentive helps clients bring complex business challenges to its network of 375,000 experts.
Quirky: A Failed Attempt at Crowdsourcing Inventions
NP
Posted on March 13, 2017 at 12:49 pm
Quirky was a brilliant idea. Why not crowd-source product ideas. Vote on the best ones. And only bring the ones people want to life. Seems foolproof right? Maybe not so much...
Boaty McBoatface- Lessons From Failed Crowdsourcing
Jack K
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 6:49 pm
Britain’s NERC elected to ‘crowd-source’ the name of its new $300mm research vessel. The Public responded with 124,000 votes for “Boaty McBoatface.” As The Atlantic reported, “The people of the Internet had spoken, and they’d spoken like a five-year-old.”
Wikipedia
Megan Wu
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 5:21 pm
Crowdsourcing Knowledge
Angie’s List: The Original in Crowd-Sourced Reviews
Lauren
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 3:24 pm
For over 20 years, Angie's List has leveraged technology to help homeowners make wise purchasing decisions, but does the company have staying power?
[2] Kaggle: Building deep communities for deep learning
Oyku
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 1:40 am
Kaggle is a competition platform that leverages crowdsourcing to find solutions for deep learning problems. This blog summarizes how Kaggle managed to create value and its challenge to stay relevant
Ancestry.com: Crowdsourcing Genealogy
shsenior
Posted on March 20, 2017 at 12:43 pm
Ancestry.com uses a combination of technology, historical archives, DNA testing and the contributions of members to help amateur genealogists trace their family histories. Ancestry has over 2.5M paying subscribers and over 20Bn records dating back to the 13th century that [...]
TED: Changing the World, 18 Minutes at a Time
Kathy Wang
Last modified on March 21, 2017 at 8:00 am
Power posing. Underwater sea creatures. Reinventing the education system. Most of us have watched a TED Talk – but how did it leverage its community to grow into a global phenomenon, or is it really just one big groupthink bubble?
Waze: Traffic from the Crowd
Will Newell
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 4:02 pm
Waze promises more reliable traffic information using active and passive driver inputs.
Quantopian: Crowd Sourcing Hedge Funds
David
Posted on March 17, 2017 at 5:34 pm
Quantopian harnesses the power of crowds by allowing anyone to contribute quantitative investment strategies through their platform - and get paid for performance.
Athenahealth Marketplace – crowdsourcing in health care
Steelhead
Posted on March 20, 2017 at 3:36 am
In 2013, Athenahealth launched the “More Disruption Please” (MDP) program, a platform that brings together entrepreneurs, investors, clinicians and industry experts to discover new ways to improve healthcare. The MDP Accelerator invests in startups through the MDP program and provides [...]
Innocentive : Incentivizing Innovation
Charu Manglani
Posted on March 19, 2017 at 2:27 pm
Innocentive pioneered the concept of crowdsourcing for R&D especially in the Pharma Industry which is highly dependent on innovating novel ideas. It lent challenge a new meaning through sourcing ideas from a wider auudience.
Foursquare: Using Crowdsourcing to Fuel a Turnaround
Alex Sambvani
Posted on March 20, 2017 at 11:59 pm
Foursquare used crowdsourcing to pivot in the midst of stalled growth, quietly becoming the world's leader in location-based data.
Tradiio – Experimenting with Crowds in the Music Industry
Stephanie Chan
Last modified on March 19, 2017 at 7:00 pm
This is the story of Tradiio, a music startup that launched as a crowdsourced virtual stock market for emerging artists and later pivoted to become a direct-to-fan crowdfunding platform.
Vine: Short Lived Video, and Fame
GJ
Last modified on March 19, 2017 at 11:39 pm
Vine was a microblog in a form of super short clips. The video will run for six seconds and repeated in continuous loop. The company was founded in June 2012 by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll. By limiting [...]
Jones Soda: Birthday Cake Cane Sugar Soda, Anyone? (Contest-Based Crowdsourcing Failure)
Alexander Clamor
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 6:00 pm
When I lived in New York, I used to walk into my favorite Starbucks shop and always see a healthy stock of Jones Soda in the small refrigerated section near the cash register. Waiting in line, I would peruse through [...]
Gigwalk
Megan Trout
Posted on March 19, 2017 at 9:57 pm
Expanding the Brand Manager’s reach through Crowdsourcing
Lithium // The Future of Customer Service
changeme_26
Last modified on March 21, 2017 at 8:33 am
Lithium started as a gaming platform - it later became a Crowd Sourced Customer Service Platform.
Gold Rush Crowdsourcing
Seunghyun
Last modified on March 20, 2017 at 11:41 pm
Golden Crowdsourcing in the very Conventional Industry