I attended an inspiring forum recently, sponsored by Deloitte and the Insight Exchange and facilitated by Ross Dawson of Advanced Human Strategies on the Topic
“Getting Results From 
Crowdsourcing”.
It was a chance to meet some inspiring people who you would put in the innovators and first movers category that provide ideas that you can apply to your own business.
“Crowdsourcing” is the name used to describe how companies access resources from large groups of people around the planet. There are many platforms and approaches to tap the power of the crowd, including
- Services marketplaces
- Competition sites
- Idea platforms
- Crowdfunding
Every business today needs to understand how accessing experts and resources outside the organisation can help them to grow faster and create more professional results. However it is not always easy to make it work.
There were two speakers who caught my interest, Yvonne Adele the CEO of Ideas Culture and Matt Barrie the CEO of Freelancer.com.
Yvonne has just launched a new service which is titled “Ideas While You Sleep” and this is how it works.
If you have a business challenge and you would like the global community to help you find some ideas (brainstorming) to help you answer that challenge then you do the following
- Submit your business challenge at 4pm your time
- You receive around 100 ideas at 10am the following morning
The tools for communicating and enabling this mobilization are Twitter and Google Docs and what you obtain is a large range of inspiring ideas to answer your business challenge.
Some of the challenges solved recently were
- How do I attract the right franchisees? – Funky Photo Booth
- How do we dramatically increase vistors to realestate.com.au in 1 month? – Realestate.com.au
- How do we attract more single males to community project events? – m.a.d woman
For more challenges read more here
Ideas While You Sleep now has clients in 12 different countries and over 400 Ideas Agents ranging in age from 16-82 in 8 countries.
Matt’s company Freelancer.com is the world’s largest micro-outsourcing website with over 1 million registered professionals from 234 countries & regions of the world. Through Freelancer.com, small businesses can quickly and cost effectively hire just about any skill set – on demand 24×7×365.
Matt’s Key points
- 80% of the worlds population is about to join the Internet
- More people in the world have capacity to provide labour than sell goods
- You can outsource Website design, IT & software, content writing, blogging, graphic design in fact almost anything you can think of
- Typically these services can be provided at one tenth the cost that you are paying today
Takeaway: “If I had unlimited labour at one tenth cost, what would I outsource, and what difference would that make to my business?”
Note: View a powerpoint presentation by Matt on slideshare below.
So if you had access to 100 ideas for answering your business challenges within 24 hours and you could access unlimited outsourced labour at one tenth the cost what would that do for your business?