Can Business Be Crowdsourced? 135 Real-World Examples

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / March 25, 2009 11:54 AM / 18 Comments

Crowd by James Cridland on Flickr.jpg Public collaboration, network effects, crowdsourcing - call it what you will, the read/write web is based largely on projects where the value of the whole is greater than the sum of countless parts. Those parts are contributed by individual people all over the world, often for free. It's world-changing stuff, but can businesses make effective use of this paradigm?

Anjali Ramachandran, a strategist at London-based digital agency Made by Many, has compiled a very useful list of 135 real-world examples of businesses leveraging crowd contributions online. From small projects like the collaborative advertising creation project FatMuffin to big company efforts like SAP's Ecosystem, this list is great for inspiration and context.

The web is proving to be quite disruptive to all kinds of old approaches to doing business, but there's still a shortage of case studies when it comes to new paradigms like crowdsourcing. Ramachandran's list doesn't include any evaluation of the various programs' effectiveness yet, but it's a great place to start. The big list is separated into four parts and each is sortable by project, sector and country of origin. If you'd like to search inside the project and company websites for all 135 examples, we've pulled those links into this custom search engine.

The Crowdsourcing List is itself a crowdsourced effort. It's a wiki, so other people can sign up to contribute more examples; it's been spread around Twitter through retweets and hit the most popular page of social bookmarking site Delicious without having had any media or blog coverage yet as far as we can see.

Lists like this are a great way to add value to conversations on the web and they help technology changes feel all the more tangible. It brings to mind the new Creative Commons database of case studies. Crowdsourcing in particular is something that we've written about extensively here on ReadWriteWeb.

Thanks, Anjali, for putting together this list!

Photo above CC from Flickr user Chris Hambly.

Comments

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That's awesome! What a great resource. Thanks, Marshall. I'll be adding Poptent and XLNTads to the list if we're not there already! We're busy crowdsourcing commercial video advertising creation for companies like Nestle, Anheuser-Busch and Callaway Golf (to name a few).

Posted by: Mark Schoneveld | March 25, 2009 12:52 PM

Good to see more and more crowdsource applications are picking up. A market that really needs a crowdsource solution are the local businesses since small business owners heavy rely on customer feedback. That's were we come in. FeedbackJar is a community customer support site allowing customers helping other customers.

Posted by: nick | March 25, 2009 12:55 PM

This is great: I'm writing a book on "Democratizing Data," one of benefits of making data public accessible is that folks can collaborate and crowdsource, create new biz opportunities. Thanks so much!

Posted by: W David | March 25, 2009 1:37 PM

There is also a similar wiki of Social Media Marketing Examples.

Find it here:

http://wiki.beingpeterkim.com/master-list/page-2

Posted by: Eyal Sela | March 25, 2009 1:43 PM

Then there is the idea of the Open Company: taking it all the way:
http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2009/opencompany

Posted by: Ed | March 25, 2009 1:44 PM

Thanks, Anjali and Marshall for sharing this Wiki and the Creative Commons case study Wiki both valuable reference guides. That pay homage and advance the craft of Ward Cunningham original WikiWiki vision.

Happy Birthday, Ward

Posted by: Eric | March 25, 2009 1:45 PM

Nice list. It's great that Anjali is using crowdsourcing to create a list of crowdsourcing examples.

Posted by: Allan | March 25, 2009 1:51 PM

This is such a fantastic resource. I have just finished writing my new book Leadershift - reinventing leadership for the age of mass collaboration to be released in July and I wish I had seen it earlier to help me with my first data cut (would have saved a lot of time!). What is telling about the list is the number of projects established businesses are driving through crowdsourcing this is leading to a clash of culture between the participative nature of crowdsourcing and autocratic managerial style of many hierarchies.

Posted by: emmanuel Gobillot | March 25, 2009 3:08 PM

This is very cool guys, digging the public acknowledgment of crowdsourcing!

Posted by: goodmars | March 25, 2009 3:12 PM

Here is a similiar list but focused on companies that crowdsource ideas: http://budurl.com/mkopeninnovation

Posted by: Matt Greeley | March 25, 2009 4:12 PM

SO useful. And a great way to track the evolution of the concept. Would be interested to see where it's at in a year or two.

Posted by: Kat Scholtz | March 25, 2009 10:34 PM

The value of the whole is greater than the sum of countless parts. Those parts are contributed by individual people all over the world, often for free. It's world-changing stuff

Posted by: suzy orman | March 26, 2009 4:06 AM

Excellent post, excellent list. Thank you.

Posted by: scrr | March 27, 2009 2:38 AM

Seems like there's a mixture of concepts on the list ranging from online suggestion boxes to more marketing-focused initiatives. I'd suggest looking closer at Communispace (www.communispace.com) and some of its research on online communities, especially the impact of size on the community dynamic and how to translate listening into actionable insights. This a great list, but I think it may need a few more caveats.

Scott

Posted by: Scott Bauman | March 27, 2009 9:23 AM

Very interesting study. I always enjoy these articles. I'll have to look more into this and put something about it on grateware.

Posted by: Matt | April 2, 2009 8:48 PM

Seems like boya there's a mixture of concepts on the list ranging from online suggestion boya boxes to more marketing-focused initiatives. I'd suggest looking closer at Communispace (www.communispace.com) and some of its research boya on online communities, especially the impact of size on the community dynamic boya and how to translate listening into actionable insights. This a great list, but I think it may need a few more caveats

Posted by: boya | April 17, 2009 12:06 PM