Mainstream Manufacturing Innovation — Crowdsourcing or Crowd Marketplace?
Derek Singleton, an ERP Analyst that covers job shop manufacturing software, recently posted an excellent view onThree Ways to Bring Crowdsourcing into Mainstream Manufacturing.
[ff @ERPAdvice]
Derek’s view is that crowd adoption by the manufacturing industry can be accelerated by addressing 3 main areas:
1. Ease into crowdsourcing for idea creation.
2. Divide projects to protect intellectual property.
3. Create a single file sharing system for design files.
I’ve long held the view that crowd sourcing is an excellent solution to surface unique talent and ideas regardless of education, background or place. The issue with crowd sourcing adoption in traditional non-IT technology industries is the difficulty of consuming it as a service in a way that slower moving and more highly governed enterprises can understand without severely disrupting their business processes.
This begs the question of whether the best way to access this talent pool in the crowd is the current crowd sourcing model, or an online marketplace for skills to address the requirements of discrete sections of the production process? A manufacturing crowd marketplace provides excellent safeguards, such as ranking, reputation and sharable and reusable generic IP in the form of generic design files or processes.
This leads me to think that, along with Derek’s 3 points above, the challenge is that crowdsourcing is not easily consumed by the enterprise. The big winners over the next few years will be those that figure out how to enable access to the crowd in either the current spec work format or within a structured vertical marketplace, such as manufacturing in specific industries. Much like offshoring has matured into a scalable, robust, enterprise ready service, the crowd needs to mature, or more specifically , the enabling environment for consuming the services of the crowd need to get enterprise ready. They’re coming…
