Crowd sourcing: Business Innovation and Creativity

Brain Reactions: Crowd sourcing Problem Solving and Business Innovation

I’m quite fascinated by the trends toward open innovation, particularly crowd sourcing which leverages the wisdom of the crowd to help make better decisions. There are several companies that are in the crowdsourcing for business space.

A new example of crowd sourcing. A startup Brain Reactions just launched and has a ton of activity according to their Compete analytics data (although Quantcast suggests a lower user base at 126K but still very sizeable number with 29% of traffic from 18-34 year olds and 45% from 35 to 49 years old ). A company can get one free question per month and the next level of around $49 allows you to ask 3 questions. (You can see an article about the CEO in Business Week)

Predictify and Linked in Answers are two similar services, although there isn’t a direct overlap. If you are interested in crowd sourcing, check out Jeff Howe’s book by the same name, We are Smarter than Me, or Wikinomics by Dan Tapscott.

A New Source of Business Innovation. For more coverage of the crowd sourcing phenomena for business innovation you can check here or the Open Innovation blog called Open Innovators.Net . Social text also has a fantastic explanation of Platforms for Participation which is an ongoing trend which is part of the whole shift toward crowd sourcing.

Three parallel ways to leverage crowd sourcing are wikis, social news voting sites, Google web analytics (and pay per click click through rates), and hosted micro-sites like Starbuck’s recent foray into social media. For a fantastic breakdown of the business case for crowd sourcing, including examples of each check out Open Innovation’s practical uses of crowd sourcing.

A Cornucopia Crowd sourcing Websites and Companies This crowd sourcing wiki is probably the best aggregation of companies leveraging the wisdom of the crowds to better understand their customers and for better products. For instance one of the 4 categorizations the wiki provides of the crowd sourcing phenomena points to about 40 different crowd sourcing examples.

CEO of Brainreactions.net interviewed on CNBC