Burning Issue presentation of Zhazgul N. , Cycle 54
IWDK event - Chaordix - Niels Jepsen
1. 1Confidential – Chaordix. Do not distribute beyond these organizations without written Chaordix consent.
Confidential. Do not distribute without
written Chaordix consent.
How to use the
power of the
crowd
2. 2Confidential – Chaordix. Do not distribute beyond these organizations without written Chaordix consent.
Hello.
4. Improve your business with
your employees
1
EngageCreate Empower
transparency and
encourage democracy
employees to enact
positive change
and connect
your team
5. Build brand advocacy
2
Go beyond the like Guide their missionsHonour the crowd’s
co-ownership of your brand
6. Co-creation
3
Go beyond the like Guide their missionsHonour the crowd’s
co-ownership of your brand
Content & Products CommerceCommunity+ +
I’m going to speak to you about how to use the power of the crowd
But first a quick introduction. My name is Niels Jepsen and I’m working at Chaordix, a crowdsourcing company based out of Calgary Canada and with presence in London UK.
At Chaordix, we are super passionate about crowdsourcing, communities and innovation and have been working with some of the largest brands on their crowdsourcing strategies and communities since 2009. So we have a lot of experience with the power of the crowd and have engaged over 1 million participants across our different communities.
We’ve previously heard how the crowd can be used if you’re a start-up that wants to fund or get feedback on a new idea, but in this short session, I will pitch 3 ways of working with your crowd if you’re an established organization. Also, I will show an example of how we have worked with VIA University College on innovation and idea generation using the crowd
Here are 3 ways in which you can work with your crowd as an established organization
First, you can involve your closest crowd of stakeholders, you’re employees, and work to improve your business with them. This will help you create transparency and encourage a democratic organization. It will also engage and connect your team members and finally it will empower your employees to enact positivie change.
Just take a look at Google and how much they involve their internal crowd by letting employees come up with their own ideas. We’re currently running an internal community with LEGO too, allowing employees to submit ideas for new products, processes etc in a structured way (no old school suggestion boxes). Other examples: 3M has a similar with 15% of the employees time, Centrica – working with employees to redefine culture and pillars of the company
You can also of course involve your crowd of consumers to build brand advocacy. Say you’re a brand and you have a lot of social media presence, well you can use the crowd to go beyond the like and connect more authentically with your crowd. We always say to our clients that they need to honour the crowd’s co-ownership of their brand and that the brand does not belong to you anymore. We saw the example yesterday in a session I was in where Airbnb doesn’t put a lot of restrictions to the use of their logo, but allows the crowd to express what they want with the airbnb logo. And if they want to talk about the brand outside of the community, you should guide their missions and help them spreading the word. HTC does that by setting up events for people to meet and discuss the brand.
Finally, you can involve your crowd in co-creation. First, the crowd can come up with new content and product ideas, but we need to move that into the community in order to iterate and validate the ideas with the community and eventually be able to commercialize the products too. Here, the crowd and the organization works together at every stage of the process as a way of de-risking the NPD process. Examples LEGO Ideas (eventually taking out both the market risk and production risk of the NPD process), Doritos Frito Lay Superbowl ad 2014 “Crash the superbowl”, P&G Connect & Develop
But how do you apply crowdsourcing in a real world context?
One of the organizations we’ve been working with to tap into the crowd VIA University College. Together, VIA and Chaordix launched last year the first ongoing crowdsourcing community connecting private and public organizations with thousands of students, educators and researchers. It’s called VIA Connect and allows organizations (local, national or international) to share real world challenges on the platforms, to which students from VIA can provide new ideas and solutions.
So essentially we’re trying to drive idea generation and innovation via challenges.
So far, we’ve been running 4 successful challenges within the fields of healthcare, food, and design and have seen several hundred submissions from VIA students. VIA Connect is offering a unique and time-and-cost efficient way for the organizations to try out and experiments with crowdsourcing with a targeted crowd. The platform is there, they just need to ask the right questions.
Through the platform and through an educational program consisting of workshops among other things, the VIA Connect team, led by Flemming Binderup Gammelgaard, is helping to equip students with the right strategic skills and tools to take on these collaborative and innovative practices that are required to solve challenges and that they will need when they go out after university to look for a job. Students get the change to solve real world problems together with real world organizations and the challenge winners even get the chance to continue working on their ideas with the organization outside of the community.
The students are being recognized for their contribution via a number of virtual incentives, meaning that they can earn badges and we have a participation score in the system to increase the gamification of the community. But also, they have more tangible incentives such as recommendations and badges on LinkedIn, gift cards and monetary rewards by the challenge sponsors/organizations.
The community continues to grow in terms of members beyond the 2100 members that are currently on the platform. VIA Connect is working across a number of faculties to get more connection to the curriculum, so this is really more than an online community. One student even took initiative to arrange an offline event in conjunction with one of the challenges, which shows that the community goes beyond what happens in this online environment.
We’re re-launching VIA Connect on the newest version of our platform in the fall together with some new exciting challenges, so we’re looking forward to see even more ideas being brought to life.