In business, you’re always going to hear about different things that may allow you to take your business’s productivity level to a new height. From outsourcing to your staff learning to be more efficient at their jobs, there are a lot of great tips out there for your business. Today we’re going to talk about one of the terms that you might hear floating around and that term is “crowdsourcing.” Let’s explore crowdsourcing so that you can understand what it is and how it can help your business.
First, to be clear, crowdsourcing is different from standard outsourcing. With traditional outsourcing, you would list a job or project opportunity and then have people write proposals to apply for it. If you have more than one task that needs to be outsourced, you’d generally list more than one project and you’d hire different people for different tasks. With crowdsourcing, you’re having several people work on the exact same thing. That thing can be anything that you want it to be; it can be brainstorming ideas, developing new software or anything that would fit the bill. The key thing to remember is that when you crowd source, the people that you choose to work for you or with you are all going to be working on the same bigger picture.
The one obvious downfall to crowdsourcing is that you’d more than likely have to end up paying each person who worked on your project. Sometimes people will volunteer for crowdsourcing projects just to gain experience, but it’s all going to depend on what you need people to do and how much time each person will have to devote to it.
How can crowdsourcing help your business? The biggest benefit is that you’re not limited to one idea or one end result. For example, say you want to start a new online division of your company but you’re not quite sure where to start. You could use crowdsourcing and use several people to brainstorm ideas for the new division. In the end, you’d have multiple ideas to choose from and depending on who you pick for the project, people from different backgrounds to assist you. The simple saying is that more brains are better than one.
Crowdsourcing isn’t right for every project or for every company, but it’s an option that’s out there and an option that may be able to help you promote or improve your business strategies.
