Introduction
The globalization of the business environment brought diverse development and economic progress. These developments lead to the creation of business concepts, ideas and opportunity for business organizations, and investors alike. Accordingly, the technological and economic progress resulted in an increased competition among businesses. There is now the necessity for business organizations and even service providers to continuously innovate and introduce new enhancement of their products. In line with the concept of innovation, business management must pool, capture and utilize the existing knowledge within its organization and use them as a tool to remain competitive. This points to the use of “crowdsourcing as a collaborative idea generation and problem solving activity, allows employees to capture explicit knowledge from large groups and teams” (Evans et al, 224).
Crowdsourcing is a concept that is recently introduced in the Information System scholarship, yet a closer examination reveals that the collective use of ideas and intelligence from a large number of people to solve business and academic issues has been practiced even in the distant past. Consequently, as a means to adapt to the innovative needs of organizations, modifications are introduced which altered the initial concept of crowdsourcing. For instance, crowdsourcing was initially defined as the process of taking traditional jobs from employees, and eventually outsourcing to an unidentified group of workers. A modification of this definition leads to a diverse description of crowdsourcing, one example of which is being “a legitimate, complex problem solving model, more than merely a new format for holding contests and awarding prizes (Amrollahi, n.p). Based on newer concepts, crowdsourcing includes the capability to aggregate talent and use ingenuity to one’s advantage while minimizing time and costs spent in solving problems.
The development and innovation of crowdsourcing concepts can be attributed to the major advances and development in terms of business globalization and technological progress. For example, it was pointed out that manufacturing organizations that aims to compete in the 21st century must overcome challenges brought about by the changing global business settings. Some of the challenges are, a) the need to meet the more intricate customer demands, such as high quality but affordable products, b) the proper handling of huge amounts of information, c) continuous product improvement and innovation, d) coming up with ways and means of better communication both with employees and customers.
The crowdsourcing process may differ across organizations, but there are four basic processes that ensure the clarity and understandability of the method. One is the conceptual design, which is a phase that provides for the specific definition of the tasks. It includes the detailed description of the duties and responsibilities of each participating member, including the endorsement of the project by the manager. Another important aspect of crowdsourcing is the selection of participants, and this involved the selection of the members of the crowdsourcing team. Further, the process of crowdsourcing should also include satisfying the query about ‘crowdsourcing should be performed?’ (Amrollahi, n.p). At this stage, the team will decide on whether to work with the use of existing platforms or come up with a new one. It is crucial in the crowdsourcing process to utilize the communication stage, because it is in this phase where correspondence allows for the airing and resolution of specific concerns.
The importance of crowdsourcing business is best appreciated by looking at how it offers solutions to specific business problems. This business process has only been around for a few years, but it has already been used widely to reach out to many organizations. Its ability to elicit knowledge from virtually unknown people through the use of different communication channels had been helpful in extracting information that were once impossible to generate. In the case of manufacturing industries, crowdsourcing offers a solution, both in terms of generating new ideas and coming up with way out of a given business problem.
Overall, business organizations can now resort to receiving timely and useful guidelines in their operations. Management leaders today have the privilege to compare and select an applicable crowdsourcing process that suit their operational needs. It is to be noted that organizations may differ in terms of selecting crowdsourcing process for their specific operation. This is because they have to choose based on their business environment, as well as both time and budget available. In the case of organizations that have an existing process within their system, they can perform better through a continuous assessment. This helps them understand and assess the strength and weakness of their current system, and may come up with a new concept to perform different activities to improve.
Crowdsourcing has significantly improved the operation of both local and multi-national companies. It has provided many manufacturing systems with advanced and knowledge-intensive environment that helped employees become well versed on the intricacies of the operation. It is pointed out that crowdsourcing are more helpful to businesses when more business and employees comprehend how it helps in improving ideas and business operations.
Works Cited
Amrollahi, Alireza. "A Process Model for Crowdsourcing: Insights from the Literature on Implementation." Australasian Conference on Information Systems (2015): n. pag. Web.
Evans, Richard, James Gao, Sara Mahdikhah, Mourad Messaadia, and David Baudry. "A Reveiw of Crowdsourcing Literature Related to the Manufacturing Industry." Journal of Advanced Management Science 4.3 (2016): n. pag. Web.
