PurpleCar

The term “crowdsourcing“  is widening in definition.  It used to mean sending one particular problem out to the universe.  The amorphous crowd, that undefinable pack of listeners floating around in space, would come up with a solution, either individually or working together and send it in.

Find your crowd.

Small businesses aren’t going to be hiring big corporate crowdsourcing services like Innocentive, but they can use Web 2.0 technologies to gather data and have conversations with their customers or potential customer base.  Gathering data and ideas is now considered to be under the umbrella term “crowdsourcing.” Here are 5 FREE ways you can crowdsource for your small business.

1. Start with your immediate, real life crowd. This means ask your own employees, friends or contacts, maybe even your child’s kindergarten class to help you come up with a solution or new ideas.

A particular anecdotal example of this type of private crowdsourcing came from NASA (it was told to me at my former employer, Mars, Inc. when I was a server administrator):

The space shuttle Atlantis was 600 pounds too heavy.  In space flights, even the slightest pounds make a difference.  The NASA engineers had to get rid of exactly 600 pounds or the mission would fail.  The engineers could not figure out where to trim this weight.    They had planned every last detail down to its maximum efficiency.  These highly trained, world-class engineers mulled over the problem for weeks.  Finally someone suggested that they get every single NASA employee in one room and present the problem.  Every employee from the night janitors to the mechanics to the secretaries to the astronauts were called into one big assembly with the engineers in the front on stage.  They explained the problem.  The crowd sat, thinking.

Then one lone voice from the very back of the room called out: Read the rest of this entry »