Category / EN : Brands & Companies

by YannigRoth

Companies increasingly use crowdsourcing strategicaly: Cisco’s I-Prize

crowdsourcing-design-competitions-representation

The visualization of “design competitions” as described by Lampel, Jha & Bhalla (2012)

Actually both brands and companies increasingly use crowdsourcing in their strategies: brands do it often for marketing and communication, companies do in for innovation. The latter has been described in a recently published article: Test-Driving the Future: How Design Competitions Are Changing Innovation, written by three London researchers, and published in Academy of Management Perspectives. It focuses on innovation-related crowdsourcing, like Cisco’s and GE’s challenges. Let me give some information about the former in this post. Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

The first (crowdsourced) timeline of crowdsourcing by brands

bubble-timeline-illustration

I’m happy to present the first visualization of the use of crowdsourcingby brands over time. This interactive timeline, called Crowdsourcing by World’s Best Global Brands, is built on Tiki-Toki, a tool to create timelines. Tiki-Toki turned out to be a good way to show how the use of crowdsourcing has exploded since the early 2000’s. The objective was indeed to have a rich and visual representation of how brands increasingly use of crowdsourcing to pursue marketing- and innovation-related business objectives. And the best part is: it will be crowdsourced. Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

Whitepapers about crowdsourcing, co-creation and open innovation

screens in tiles layout

Last year, I compiled a selection of academic representations of crowdsourcing, co-creation and open innovation. The post is one of the most popular one of this blog, which indicates that there’s quite some interest in these topics. Now, let me share some whitepapers in a similar manner. Generally speaking, a whitepaper is an authoritative report or guide that helps solve a problem (Wikipedia). It is very common for companies to write commercial whitepapers today, designed to promote their products or services. Leading actors in the fields of crowdsourcing, co-creation and open innovation have written numerous whitepapers to promote their respective categories, and here’s a selection of them.

I only selected whitepapers that have been written and published by actors of the field, like consultancies and platforms, leaving aside brand-initiated documents. Also, the whitepapers are listed in some categories (crowdsourcing/co-creation /open innovation), but the companies might also be associated to several of then (for example, eYeka positions itself on co-creation, but uses crowdsourcing and is sometimes also associated to open innovation) Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

B’Twin and Local Motors launch a series of contests to co-create an electric tricycle

the forge btwin competition

Yesterday I received an email from B’Twin’s press department, it was entitled “the 1st bike created by a global community” (in French). That made me curious, and after reading the email and the attached press release, it was clearer what they meant by this statement : the bicycle brand has launched a co-creation contest on Local Motors’ community website The Forge to ask people to design a new personal transport vehicle, the “B’Twin Vélomobile”. A couple of months ago, Quirky has held a short project about reinventing the bicycle, but it was more an entertainment/PR/community animation project than an actual co-creation project. Want to know a little bit more about B’Twin’s contest? Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

11 of the 12 Best Global Brands use creative crowdsourcing

100

Click on the image to get to Interbrand’s poster of the 100 Best Global Brands

UPDATE (Sep 19th 2012): To find a visual and interactive illustration of all the cases listed below, see my timeline of crowdsourcing initiatives by brands

This is going to be a loooooong post – eventually. I will try to list all the creative crowdsourcing initiatives that I know of, applied to Interbrand’s ranking of the 100 Best Global Brands. I eagerly invite you to contribute with your knowledge because I might miss some – what do I say – I will miss some of them. Why list all these crowdsourcing initiatives? I would like this post to be another way to show how big creative crowdsourcing is getting in marketing and innovation. I hope you like it. And again, please share the creative crowdsourcing initiatives (contests, engagement platforms, challenges etc.) that I missed – and let us stick to the brands (not the parent companies). Thanks! Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

Merging two crowdsourcing platforms: what challenges?

innocentive-omnicompete

A week ago, InnoCentive announced the aquisition of OmniCompete, another innovation-contest platform. To my knowledge, it’s the first acquisition of one contest-platform by another (correct me if I’m wrong). In the blog post that announced this strategic move, InnoCentive’s and OmniCompete’s CEOs explain the rationale for this merger, but I think that this type of operation also implies interesting challenges concerning platform- and community-management. Continue reading →