Crowdsourcing students for open-innovation

Abstract

Nowadays, many researchers and companies are seeking to provide answers to a fundamental question: “How can an organization apply collective intelligence through open innovation and crowdsourcing to create competitive advantage?” On the other hand, the global growth of on-line sales, the web 2.0 revolution and the ability to reach users, professionals and influencers by means of the World Wide Web glorifies the need of updating the firms’ open-innovation strategies. Crowdsourcing (Howe, 2008) and open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003) are two specific types of collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is in general addressed to the outcome of a group of individuals who do things collectively in the way that it seems intelligent (Malone, et al., 2009). In other words, collective intelligence involves groups of individuals collaborating to create synergy, something greater than each individual part (Castelluccio, 2006). This project started on November 15, 2010, with the objective of providing solutions for the problem statement that was provided by Philips High Impact Innovation Center: “University students are a potentially very rich source of innovation ideas, as shown by several Philips projects and external bench¬marks. Current use of this resource is ad hoc and limited in topic and geographical scope. When it is done, most often there is no concrete follow- up within Philips. It is unclear, at what stages of in¬novation processes, and how to ensure the most value is extracted for Philips”. In order to gain better understanding of the key factors, which shape the structure of the problem, literature research was conducted (chapter 2) on: (1) Network-centric Open innovation, (2) Crowdsourcing and on-line community construction, (3) Product and brand strategy, and (4) Motivation and group collaboration. In the next phase (chapter 3: Analysis), we analyzed the market by identifying and studying the leading enterprises of the innovation market. In order to explore the market trends, we followed some influential blogs and discussion forums on a daily basis. Market analysis highlighted a very basic and fundamental fact: student crowdsourcing is an on-line effort that highly relies on the “social media policy” of a firm. We realized that in order to gain competitive advantage, it is essential to define the competition set, paying distinctive attention to the on-line trait of student crowdsourcing. In the analysis phase we also studied the advances and trends in social media technology. Policies on leveraging social media and the trends in this domain were also extracted from annual market predictions of leading enterprises. The next step was dedicated to understanding of the needs, characteristics and capabilities of students. The role of students and the type of incentives that motivate them to participate in challenges such as idea competitions was also identified. By converging the results of the research phase (chapter 4) and clustering the challenges of open-innovation and crowdsourcing, we developed a decision-making model. In developing the crowdsourcing method for Philips, we tried to provide answers for all the criteria that are included in this model. On the other hand, we realized that conducting a research on models of collaboration is essential in our project. We decided to undertake a research to understand which model of collaboration generates better outcome for Philips (chapter 7). Quantity of ideas was generated in the conceptualization phase (chapter 5) by conducting a three-days on-line brainstorming. We clustered the ideas based on the solutions they provide for each crowdsourcing challenge (addressed in the decision-making model). After grouping the ideas, we developed two main concepts. Based on the evaluation factors and the objectives of the project, the final concept was selected and detailed. The ideation phase lead to development of “Philips Parrot”, which aimed to undertake an interdisciplinary, international and collaborative crowdsourcing (chapter 6). In our research on collaboration patterns (chapter 7), we defined idea sharing as the collaboration task that students would undertake in our crowdsourcing method. Then, we developed two patterns of collaboration. The objective of our research was to realize which of these patterns, produces ideas that meet Philips TV Business Group needs and interests. The TV B.G. experts set criteria for evaluation and scoring of the ideas. In order to take a concrete step toward our concept method, and by request of Philips TV Business Group, we executed a pilot test of our concept (chapter 8). We organized the pilot test, considering the patterns of idea sharing in our research. To execute the pilot test an idea contest was planed. Philips TV Business Group formulated two separate challenges for Information Technology and Industrial Design students. 105 students from 14 universities across Europe, Iran and India participated in the contest. Philips Parrot idea contest was held on May 23 to May 29, 2011 and 40 final concepts were submitted. The results of the pilot test confirm that locating the crowdsourcing open platform on social networking websites increases the collaboration and engagement of students. We came to this conclusion by comparing the results of the generic idea competition that was held in parallel to our pilot test with the outcome of the two collaboration models. The results demonstrated that collaboration on group idea sharing pattern leads to higher quality concepts for Philips than idea sharing at individual level and the generic competition models.