THE INDIAN INSTITUTE OF PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT AHMEDABAD

Thesis on A

CROWD SOURCING: A CONCEPT STUDY IN

RELATED TO MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY

ALLUMINI REFERENCE ID:

SUBMITTED BY:

GUIDED BY: PROF.A.B. RAJU

LETTER OF CONSENT

IIPM, Ahmedabad, 19, Inquilab Society, GulbaiTekra, Ahmedabad 380015 To, The Dean, I.I.P.M Ahmedabad

Subject: Letter of consent to act as Thesis Guide.

Respected Sir, I, Prof. A.B.Raju, working as external faculty in the International Institute of Planning and Management hereby express my consent to act as a guide to Ms. Goldy Gupta (Batch: PGP/FW/10-12/IIPM). She has expressed her interest in writing a thesis on A crowd sourcing: a concept study in related to manufacturing industry and has requested me to guide her for the same. This is to inform that I shall support her as a guide for her thesis on the above mentioned topic and share my knowledge and help in all ways possible.

Yours Faithfully, Prof. A.B.Raju Sign

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PREFACE

This thesis has been carried out at the Indian Institute of Planning and Management, Ahmedabad. The objective behind the preparation of this report is to relate the Total Quality Management Concepts and theories taught in the classroom to the practical application. A proper understanding of how things are done in the organizations has become a serious component to survive in the highly competitive environment that we, the Management Students, find it as an integral part of our studies. The topic of my thesis is A crowd sourcing: a concept study in related to manufacturing industry. Here, I studied the behavior and attitude of employees towards total quality management. This is the modest attempt in applying statistical tools and techniques for analyzing the data and converting it into useful information. It is based on facts and findings noted during the primary survey in the form of questionnaires, and the information collected from various secondary sources such as the newspapers, magazines, journals, internet, etc.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Firstly, I would like to express my gratitude to my thesis guide Prof. A.B.Rajuwithout whose guidance, encouragement and professional help I would not have been able to complete my understanding for the thesis.

I would like to thank: Professors and seniors for providing the stimulus for making thesis successful. A number of academics and practitioners for generously sharing their insight and experience with me. My family and friends for giving the encouragement and love.

I am thankful to IIPM for providing me this opportunity and attempting to inculcate the traits needed to succeed. Also, a special thanks to various industry experts and executives for sharing relevant information and valuable thoughts with me and help me in writing my thesis.

SYNOPSIS
Crowd sourcing, a combination of the terms Crowd + Outsourcing, is the practice of companies, business owners or even individuals, making an open call to a broad community of people to help them solve a particular problem. Crowd sourcing is that it can drive down the cost of solving a problem quite substantially, in addition to being able to receive a huge amount of ideas, suggestions, etc. Crowd sourcing is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. This process can occur both online and offline. The difference between crowd sourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific body, such as paid employees. Crowd sourcing is related to, but not the same as, human-based computation, which refers to the ways in which humans and computers can work together to solve problems. These two methods can be used together to accomplish tasks. Crowd sourcing is used when companies or entrepreneurs need ideas and proposals from many different sources generally when companies need creativity, innovation or specialized professional skills. By using crowd sourcing you can gather ideas and suggestions from people around the world and at the same time it is a great brainstorming opportunity for generating new ideas. For example, when companies need new and fresh ideas and perspectives for new product development working with a large group of outside professionals can bring many new insights to the current issues and opportunities. Another common example is when entrepreneurs have good initial ideas for starting a new business but they still need more ideas and business or technical experience to develop a successful business model.

OBJECTIVES: To find out the scope of crowd sourcing in India. To find out the history of crowd sourcing in India. To find out the awareness among the companies about crowd sourcing. To find out the advantages and disadvantages of crowdsourcing. To find out the potential of those, willing to have a crowd sourcing in future. To find out the types of crowdsourcing. To pros and cons of crowdsourcing.

Research Methodology: Primary research: Questionnaires (Sample size = 200) Five (5) Focused Group Discussions Ten (10) Personal Interviews Secondary research: Books Magazines Articles Newspapers Internet Journals

Commercial Viability: This thesis would be useful to it is the host has a large no. of options to choose from it. Suppose if a company wants to crowd source the solution of a scientific problem even though a single best solution will win the challenge but from the other entries the company may get one or more ideas to solve other problems. Basically, if you use crowdsourcing to get a job done, it will take less time to find the right person to do the job in fact it could be almost immediately. The pool of potential pros for the job is large, and chances are that somebody will be available right away.

ABSTRACT

Often experimental and deployed in small scale scenarios, the concept of Crowd sourcing has become more than a buzzword today; with stable business models emerging globally that are increasingly more productive than ever before. For the uninitiated, Crowd sourcing refers to taking help from a crowd externally to solve a problem, as opposed to the traditional idea of hiring fixed teams and individuals internally. Usually, a company makes an open call and sets a reward for the best solution to a particular problem or task they need assistance with.Increasingly, the potentially un-restricted reach of the internet has been aiding this concept with more and more people turning to the vastness of the web to look for ways in which they can contribute, freelance, express themselves or simply gain some work experience. Thus, the contributors need not be identified or evaluated on any parameters during the early stages of a crowd-sourced project, and the company looks to benefit from the luxury of choice. There are different types of Crowd sourcing models, depending on what the business wants done. Brands looking to build relationships can take advantage of fansourcing, which seeks to benefit by connecting users with fans of the brand who are likely to be better endorsers. Another model is crowd-funding, which aims to raise money through crowds by letting an individual contribute a small amount. An excellent example of this is Kickstarter, a crowd funding portal that has seen great success with many user submitted projects. And then of-course there are also the mass collaboration tools like Wikipedia, which are using the collective intelligence of people for creating resources that are consumed by the crowds. India too has caught up with this new phenomenon, with various projects launched in different domains.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE NO. PRELIMINARIES

LETTER OF CONSENT2 LETTER OF APPROVAL.3 PREFACE...4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT .....5 SYNOPSIS6 ABSTRACT..9 LIST OF FIGURES 14

LITERATURE REVIEW Page No. Chapter1: Introduction...15 1.1 Types of Crowd sourcing17 1.1.1 Crowdvoting................................................................17 1.1.2 Crowd sourcing Creative Work...18 1.1.3 Crowdfunding.18 1.2 Wisdom of the crowd.19 1.3 Microwork..19 1.4 Inducement prize contests.20 1.5 Implicit Crowd sourcing.21 1.6 Improving business processes.22 1.7 Addressing talent crunch23
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1.8 Capitalizing on first mover advantage23 1.9 What is the difference betweenCrowd sourcing and co-creation? Has Crowd sourcing worked in India?.......................................................................................25 1.10 How can a platform such as Talenthouse assist brands in effective crowdsouring?................................................................................................................... ......26 1.11 How can a platform such as Talenthouse assist brands in effective crowdsouring?................................................................................................................... ......27 1.12 Does size matter in this business and does Talenthouse have that critical mass?27 1.13Concerns for crowdsourcers include30 1.14Objectives of the study31

Chapter2:- Literature Review32 2.1 Crowd sourcing Speeds Up Innovation33 2.2 How to Bring Crowd sourcing into the Mainstream34 2.3 What is a Crowd in Manufacturing?.......................................................................35 2.4 Crowd sourcing Can Speed Up Innovation35 2.5 Crowd sourcing Creates What the Market Wants36. 2.6 Three Ways to Make Crowd sourcing Mainstream36 2.7 Crowd sourcing to innovate38 2.8 Crowd sourcing to research new concepts38 2.9 Crowd sourcing to design new products.39 2.10 Crowd sourcing to fine tune design and concepts39 2.11 Considerations for manufacturers who crowd source39 2.12 Free Crowd sourcing40 2.13Scope of crowd sourcing in India42 2.14History of crowd sourcing in India44 2.15 Merits and drawbacks of Crowd sourcing44 2.16 Advantages and disadvantages of Crowd sourcing in related to manufacturing industry46
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2.17The Darker Side of Crowd sourcing.48 2.18Types of Crowd sourcing in India49 2.18.1 Crowd Creation..49 2.18.2 Crowd Voting51 2.18.3 Crowd Wisdom52 2.18.4Crowd Funding.52 2.19Manufacturing industry in India53 2.20 The Mechanics of Change54 2.21 Growth Barriers55 2.22Awareness among the manufacturing companies about crowd sourcing56 2.23Potential of those, willing to have a crowd sourcing in future58 2.24Risk and perspective..59 2.25Participant risk.59 2.26Organizer risk60 2.27Understanding Crowd sourcing risks.60 2.28Evaluating risk tolerance61 2.29The Risks61 2.29.1 The risks of Crowd sourcing.62 2.29.2 Risk: Crowd sourcing does not solve your organizations problem.63 2.29.3 Risk: The crowd doesnt have the answer..63 2.29.4 Risk: Failure to participate64 2.29.5 Risk: Crowd sourcing takes too much time64 2.29.6 Risk: Idea theft.65 2.29.7 Risk: Maintaining privacy.65 2.29.8 Risk: Gaming the system.66 2.30 Crowd sourcing best practices.66 2.31 Case studies..67
Chapter3:-Research Methodology70

3.1 Qualitative Vs. Quantitative Research .70 3.2 Primary Vs. Secondary Data.72
Chapter4:-Analysis74 Chapter5:-Findings86 12

Chapter6:-Recommendation88 Chapter7:-Conclusion90 Chapter8:-Bibliography93 Chapter9:-Annexure94

9.1 Questionnaire94 9.2 Response Sheets.97

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LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 1: Crowd sourcing refers to the use of the Internet to generate value from the contributions of a great many people Fig. 2: Over the past decade or so, tens of thousands of pioneering individuals have already begun to link together online in radically new cooperative ways Fig. 3: Sometimes this has been to develop free or low-cost products and services that are not being delivered by traditional, profit-first business organizations Fig. 4: In other instances, it has been to help people out, to spread useful information, or to conduct business in new ways Fig. 5: All of the above provide examples of how it is now possible for hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of ordinary citizens right around the globe to come together to share and create for the common good Fig. 6: In effect, what is happening is that the Internet is starting to be used to interconnect the intelligence of many into a single mind Fig. 7: Given that we now face so many global challenges, it may also be very fortunate that the Internet is starting to permit intelligence to be pooled in this manner Fig. 8: On the other hand, opponents of this evolution warn that not all that glitters is gold and urge not to underestimate the risks inherent in this approach Fig. 9: The risk that businesses exploit free labour to increase their profits, that qualified professionals are deprived of their source of revenue because they cannot stand the competition of the crowd and, last but not least, that quality standards decline when tasks are carried out by unqualified amateurs without any control Fig. 10: Furthermore, worries are voiced about the impact of this new approach on society and our way of living more in general, with boundaries between working and leisure time becoming blurred and crowdsourcers spending too many hours on these activities at the expense of their family or social lives Fig. 11: Crowd sourcing is radically transforming translation as we have known it up to now Fig. 12: New applications are appearing every day and all those involved in this activity are faced with new challenges in order to adapt to and keep pace with these evolutions
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

In India, we are seeing some interesting developments in Crowd sourcing. A good example is the Facebook page for Delhi Traffic Police, which uses crowd-clicked photos as proof to prosecute offending vehicles. The initiative has proved a success and every other day there are at least 10-20 notices issued for traffic-rule violations based on public participation. Impressed with the results, the police of Mumbai and Pune have set up similar services to better monitor the city streets. Another example can be of Micromax, the Indian mobile handset manufacturer that turned to Crowd sourcing to get ideas for a new logo and branding. They ran a successful contest and ultimately were able to lock on to a new design for their logo. But if there are success stories, many other attempts have met with disappointment. When t-shirt makers Tantra and Chimp decided to crowd source their design work, they expected surprisingly fresh results. But something quite different happened. As RanjivRamchandani, owner of Tantra tells Business Today in this article, About 80 per cent of our designs still come from them [regular artists]. We cant rely on Crowd sourcing because most of those designs are amateurish. Other t-shirt makers like Chimp concur, remarking that most of time they get nondescript submissions done in a hurry or copied designs that arent original work. What are we to learn from this? Two important things! First, that there needs to be more education and experimentation in India in terms working with diverse crowds, how to manage the workflow, encouraging original productive work and assigning appropriate rewards for participants. Second, businesses should not see Crowd sourcing as a silver bullet because its not. More often than not, due to the scale of such operations, some companies have had to deal with problems of mediocrity, finally making them abandon the idea. The primary drawback of Crowd sourcing is
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that because theres no filter on the skill-level of a participant, the overall quality can fall below standard. And of course, sifting through hundreds or thousands of submissions is no joke. Despite the challenges though, Crowd sourcing as a concept appeals to many entrepreneurs and companies; especially start-ups and small companies that might not always have the necessary resources to hire new people or teams or agencies. Therefore despite its drawbacks, Crowd sourcing will be around and we will surely see many interesting results in the years ahead.Crowd sourcing the art of using the power of the crowd to solve problems has been used for several functions and tasks. Typically, problems are broadcasted to an unknown group of people using the Internet, and solutions are sought. Common areas that are crowd sourced include designing a logo or developing a product. The keyword here is the community as every crowdsourced project harnesses the power of the community, and it is the community which contributes and ranks ideas to classify the strongest ideas.Can the Crowd sourcing model be applied to analytics? An Indian startup, CrowdANALYTIX thinks it can, and has come out with a unique model to harness the power of Crowd sourcing. Most businesses that have attempted to leverage the crowd so far have been confined to either the software industry or simple problem solving. With our experience in the outsourcing industry, we knew that a better model would be needed to handle more complex tasks. This prompted us to evolve the Crowd sourcing model further into what we call the Managed Crowd sourcing model where we orchestrate the process of understanding and breaking down the problem into welldefined challenges that the crowd can then attack. These challenges are posed to the crowd as contests, explains Kishore Rajgopal, CEO and Co-Founder,

CrowdANALYTIX, who established the company with Divyabh Mishra, Founder and President. Unlike other Crowd sourcing processes, CrowdANALYTIX has a well-defined template. As a first step, the firm understands the requirements of a client and collects
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the data necessary for the modeling challenge. This is done by a lead analyst, who is also responsible for managing the contest and validating the responses. The firm then creates a contest with details on whats expected from the modeling challenge including the method for validating the submitted models. Participants are then invited to contribute in the contest. Each participant is allowed to submit multiple responses. For example, in a contest, that the firm executed for Predicting the quality of red and white wines, CrowdANALYTIX received over 200 model submissions from over 150 participants located in 15 countries around the world. Models were evaluated almost in real-time and the top ten models were maintained throughout the contest on a leader board. This leader board was updated on a daily basis. The model that was finally accepted as the winning one was 400 percent more optimized than the clients expectations. Types of Crowd sourcing In coining the term of Crowd sourcing, Jeff Howe has also indicated some common categories of Crowd sourcing that can be used effectively in the commercial world. Some of these web-based Crowd sourcing efforts include crowdvoting,wisdom of the crowd, crowdfunding, microwork, creative Crowd sourcing and inducement prize contests. Although these may not be an exhaustive list, they cover the current major ways in which people use crowds to perform tasks. Crowdvoting: Crowdvoting occurs when a website gathers a large group's opinions and judgment on a certain topic. The Iowa Electronic Market is a prediction market that gathers crowds' views on politics and tries to ensure accuracy by having participants pay money to buy and sell contracts based on political outcomes.Threadless.com selects the t-shirts it sells by having users provide designs and vote on the ones they like, which are then printed and available for purchase. Despite the small nature of the company, thousands of members provide designs and vote on them, making the websites products truly created and selected by the crowd, rather than the company.Some of the most famous
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examples have made use of social media channels: Domino's Pizza, Coca Cola, Heineken and Sam Adams have thus crowd sourced a new pizza, song, bottle design or beer, respectively. Crowd sourcing Creative Work: Creative Crowd sourcing spans sourcing creative projects such as graphic design, architecture, apparel design, writing, illustration etc. Some of the better known creative domains that use the Crowd sourcing model include

99designs,DesignCrowd, Crowdspring, Jade Magnet, Threadless, Poptent, and Tongal Crowdfunding: Crowdfunding is the process of funding your projects by a multitude of people contributing a small amount in order to attain a certain monetary goal. The dilemma right now is how the SEC is going to regulate the entire process. As it stands rules and regulations are being refined by the SEC and they will have until Jan. 1st, 2013 to tweak the fundraising methods. The regulators are on edge because they are already overwhelmed trying to regulate Dodd - Frank and all the other rules and regulations involving public companies and the way they trade. Advocates of regulation claim that crowdfunding will open up the flood gates for fraud, have called it the wild west of fundraising, and have compared it to the 1980s days of penny stock cold-call cowboys. The process allows for up to 1 million dollars to be raised without a lot of the regulations being involved. Companies under the current proposal will have a lot of exemptions available and be able to raise capital from a larger pool of persons which can include a lot lower thresholds for investor criteria whereas the old rules required that the person be an accredited investor. These people are often recruited from social networks, where the funds can be acquired from an equity purchase, loan, donation, or pre-ordering. The amounts collected have become quite high, with requests that are over a million dollars for software like Trampoline Systems, which used it to finance the commercialization of their new software. A well-known crowdfunding tool is Kickstarter, which is the biggest website for funding creative projects. It has risen over $100 million, despite its all-or-nothing
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model which requires one to reach the proposed monetary goal in order to acquire the money. UInvest is another example of a crowdfunding platform that was started in Kiev, Ukraine in 2007. Crowdrise brings together volunteers to fundraise in an online environment. Most recently, the adult industry gained its own site in the way of Offbeatr. Offbeatr allows the community to cast votes on projects they would like to see make it to the funding phase. Wisdom of the crowd: Wisdom of the crowd is another type of Crowd sourcing that collects large amounts of information and aggregates them to gain a complete and accurate picture of a topic, based on the idea that a group of people is on average more intelligent than an individual. This idea of collective intelligence proves particularly effective on the web because people from diverse backgrounds can contribute in real-time within the same forums. iStockPhoto provides a platform for people to upload photos and purchase them for low prices. Clients can purchase photos through credits, giving photographers a small profit. Again, the photo collection is determined by the crowd's voice for very low prices.In February 2012, a stock picking game called Ticker Picker Pro was launched, using Crowd sourcing to create a hedge fund that would buy and sell stocks based on the ideas coming out of the game. These crowd sourced ideas, coming from so many people, could help one pick the best stocks based on this idea that collective ideas are better than individual ones. Microwork: Microwork is a Crowd sourcing platform where users do small tasks for which computers lack aptitude for low amounts of money. Amazons popular Mechanical Turk has created many different projects for users to participate in, where each task requires very little time and offers a very small amount in payment. The Chinese versions of this, commonly called Witkey, are similar and include such sites as
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Taskcn.com and k68.cn. When choosing tasks, since only certain users win, users learn to submit later and pick less popular tasks in order to increase the likelihood of getting their work chosen. An example of a Mechanical Turk project is when users searched satellite images for images of a boat in order to find lost researcher Jim Gray. Inducement prize contests: Web-based idea competitions or inducement prize contests often consist of generic ideas, cash prizes, and an Internet-based platform to facilitate easy idea generation and discussion. An example of these competitions includes an event like IBMs 2006 Innovation Jam, attended by over 140,000 international participants and yielding around 46,000 ideas. Another example of competition-based Crowd sourcing is the

2009 DARPA experiment, where DARPA placed 10 balloon markers across the United States and challenged teams to compete to be the first to report the location of all the balloons. A collaboration of efforts was required to complete the challenge quickly and in addition to the competitive motivation of the contest as a whole, the winning team (MIT, in less than nine hours) established its own collaborapetitive environment to generate participation in their team. A similar challenge was the Tag Challenge, funded by the US State Department, which required locating and photographing individuals in 5 cities in the US and Europe within 12 hours based only on a single photograph. The winning team managed to locate 3 suspects by mobilizing volunteers world-wide using a similar incentive scheme to the one used in the Balloon Challenge. Open innovation platforms are a very effective way of Crowd sourcing peoples thoughts and ideas to do research and development. The company InnoCentive is a Crowd sourcing platform for corporate research and development where difficult scientific problems are posted for crowds of solvers to discover the answer and win a cash prize, which can range from $10,000 to $100,000 per

challenge. IdeaConnection.com challenges people to come up with new inventions and innovations and Ninesigma.com connects clients with experts in various fields. The X
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PRIZE Foundation creates and runs incentive competitions where one can win between $1 million and $30 million for solving challenges. Local Motors is another example of Crowd sourcing. A community of 20,000 automotive engineers, designers and enthusiasts competes to build offroad rally trucks. Implicit crowdsourcing: Implicit Crowd sourcing is less obvious because users do not necessarily know they are contributing, yet can still be very effective in completing certain tasks. Rather than users actively participating in solving a problem or providing information, implicit Crowd sourcing involves users doing another task entirely where a third party gains information for another topic based on the users actions.A good example of implicit Crowd sourcing is the ESP game, where users guess what images are and then these labels are used to tag Google images. Another popular use of implicit Crowd sourcing is through reCAPTCHA, which asks people to solve Captchas in order to prove they are human, and then provides Captchas from old books that cannot be deciphered by computers in order to try and digitize them for the web. Like Mechanical Turk, this task is simple for humans but would be incredibly difficult for computers. Piggyback Crowd sourcing can be seen most frequently by websites such as Google that mine ones search history and websites in order to discover keywords for ads, spelling corrections, and finding synonyms. In this way, users are unintentionally helping to modify existing systems, such as Googles ad words.There are a number of motivations for businesses to use Crowd sourcing to accomplish tasks, find solutions for problems, or to gather information. These include the ability to offload peak demand, access cheap labor and information, generate better results, access a wider array of talent than might be present in one organization, and undertake problems that would have been too difficult to solve internally. Crowd sourcing allows businesses to submit problems in which contributors can work on, such as problems in science, manufacturing, biotech, and medicine, with monetary rewards for successful solutions. Although it can be difficult to crowd source complicated tasks, simple work tasks can be crowd sourced cheaply and effectively.
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Crowdsourcing also has the potential to be a problem-solving mechanism for government and nonprofit use. Urban and transit planning are prime areas for Crowd sourcing. One project to test Crowd sourcing's public participation process for transit planning in Salt Lake City has been underway from 2008 to 2009, funded by a U.S. Federal Transit Administration grant. Another notable application of Crowd sourcing to government problem solving is the Peer to Patent Community Patent Review project for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Researchers have used crowdsourcing systems, in particular Mechanical Turk, to aid with research projects by crowdsourcing aspects of the research process such as data collection, parsing, and evaluation. Notable examples include using the crowd to create speech and language databases,and using the crowd to conduct user studies. Crowdsourcing systems provide these researchers with the ability to gather large amount of data. Additionally, using Crowd sourcing, researchers can collect data from populations and demographics they may not have had access too locally, but that improve the validity and value of their work. Artists have also utilized Crowd sourcing systems. In his project the Sheep Market, Aaron Koblin used Mechanical Turk to collect 10,000 drawings of sheep from contributors around the world. Sam Brown (artist) leverages the crowd by asking visitors of his website explodingdog to send him sentences that he uses as inspirations for paintings. Art curator Andrea Grover argues that individuals tend to be more open in crowd sourced projects because they are not being physically judged or scrutinized. As with other crowd sourcers, artists use Crowd sourcing systems to generate and collect data. The crowd also can be used to provide inspiration for an artists work and also to collect financial support for that work. Improving business processes The benefits for end clients are huge as this approach not only solves the issue of talent crunch, but its fee is also lower than what traditional analytic firms charge. And more importantly, it ensures an improvement in business processes. Our approach ensures that the model received by companies is optimum and at a fraction of the cost
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of what traditional analytics services firms would charge. A one percent improvement in a models predictive power can translate into millions of dollars added to the bottom line, says Rajgopal. Today, all analysis is done on a private cloud-based platform, which is prepared with the client's specifications. As this is a cloud-based infrastructure, this has the ability to handle Big Data with the capacity to scale. The company says that its pricing is 25-30 percent lower than the best alternative sources of consulting and outsourcing. Addressing talent crunch CrowdANALYTIX has hit a sweet spot globally, there is a talent crunch for good data analysts. While technology is evolving, access to quality talent is still a huge issue. A recent report commissioned by EMC Corporation confirms this trend. The EMC Data Science study released in December 2011 revealed that there is a rampant scarcity across the globe for the prerequisite skills necessary for a company to capitalize on the opportunities found at the intersection of Big Data and data analytics. More importantly, the study noted that only one-third of companies are able to effectively use new data to assist their business decision-making, gain competitive advantage, drive productivity growth, yield innovation and reveal customer insights. This has worked to CrowdANALYTIXs advantage, as Rajgopal explains, Statistical analysis is an area where there are several extremely talented and highly qualified professionals globally who choose to work as consultants and dont like being confined to organizations. This unique aspect combined with the fact that good talent is scarce and spread out globally, we felt our model would add tremendous value by just getting businesses access to this pool of talent. Capitalizing on first mover advantage CrowdANALYTIX is in a rare space there is perhaps just one global company Kaggle that has a similar business model to them. However, Rajgopal is quick to point out the key difference. Says he, We have a first-mover advantage. Kaggle is a company that also does something similar but there's a key difference between them
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and us. For Kaggle, Crowd sourcing analytics is a business model. It is their primary pitch. For CrowdAanalytix, Crowd sourcing of analytics is a delivery model. The company which has been recently founded is initially focusing on building a strong community and executing a few beta projects. In India, the firm has already executed a project for an Indian customer, which wanted to optimize the process of sourcing of second hand aircraft parts globally for an Indian aerospace consulting firm. The objective -- get the community to arrive at ways of minimizing risks and maximizing profits in sourcing of aircraft parts globally. If CrowdANALYTIXs model takes off as its founders have envisaged, then analytics could truly become affordable to every company. With the advent of social media, a deluge of data has not only hit the large companies but also the SMEs. With this model, analytics will become affordable and accessible by SMEs too. Additionally, more complex and rare data analytics challenges that don't get addressed due to lack of access to the right talent will start getting solved more frequently, predicts Rajgopal. By leveraging the power of the crowd to transform analytics, CrowdANALYTIX is pioneering a new approach that will be closely watched by other companies. Thought not strictly comparable, a close example with a similar approach is Kaggle, which has a community of over 25,000 professionals, including computer scientists, statisticians and academics. The Crowd sourcing model by firms like Kaggle has been used by big companies such as Ford and Microsoft.

While the opportunity is huge, the success of the model will be judged on the quality of the algorithms that are developed by this approach, and the time taken to develop a specific algorithm. If CrowdANALYTIX is successful, managed Crowd sourcing could become a familiar buzzword, as outsourcing was a decade back.When a brand crowd sources, it tells its consumers that I (the brand) am listening to you. Im delighted that you are contributing to my idea. I appreciate the fact that you are taking ownership of the brand that you like. It also tells that Im willing to gratify you for
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your idea. Creative Crowd sourcing is fast gaining pace in India with brands and mentors opting for a convenient platform to engage with their audiences. The uniqueness of this platform is that it engages socially. So, the moment a person comes and uploads an entry on Talenthouse, there is a message that goes to all her friends on Facebook that she has participated in a programme for a particular brand on Talenthouse. This allows a viral effect. For example, if youre a writer, one out of your seven friends is a writer, too. The moment they notice that their friend is already getting an edge and taking part, they, too, want to participate. After a point, we close entries for voting; while the voting is on, I (Talenthouse user) can go back to my friends, ask them to cast their votes. So, artists can, at times, get 5,000 engagements on Facebook a big value for brands given that when friends endorse a brand, its far more effective than a particular brand endorsing for itself. If it had been a fad, we would have done just a few projects and we would have faded out by now. Crowd sourcing is a reality the world over. Can Crowd sourcing address strategic issues like product development and innovation? What will be the trends in India? A lot of Crowd sourcing platforms are only focusing on product design. With Kurkure, we outsourced this years Diwali look and feel for packaging. Crowd sourcing can contribute in more than one ways that you can think of. We have done product design, signature tune, logo design, television script, viral videos and the first look of a campaign. The crowd has contributed in all these aspects. I think, the future of Crowd sourcing can be predicted with big Indian brands having now realised the potential of tapping into the community resources. This will ultimately result in co-creation wherein a brand will develop products along with its consumer.

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What is the difference between Crowd sourcing and co-creation? Has Crowd sourcing worked in India? For example, artiste Lady Gaga says I want a videographer to come and write for me. When two companies, brands, a brand and its consumer, a company and its suppliers collaborate its co-creation. When we go out and reach out to a bigger pool of talent, who we may not know, thats Crowd sourcing. We would be successful as a Crowd sourcing platform if brands come back to go through the process all over again. Almost 80 per cent of the companies that Ive approached have loved the platform. Of that, 30 per cent have adopted it and the rest have said they will come back when they have the right brief. We dont hard sell the platform, we hard sell the opportunity. If the opportunity exists, the client will come back. How can a platform such as Talenthouse assist brands in effective crowdsouring? We started our journey in India a year ago with American heavy metal band, Metallica. When it came, it wanted a lead band to open the act before they performed on stage. In just 10 days, over 200 bands from across the country responded. We got five bands from Germany who also wanted to participate. We finally got a winner, a band that Metallica loved. After that, we have hunted scripts for VidhuVinod Chopra, Vipul Shah (leading film directors and producers); music for Shaan (singer), Nerolac (home paint brand) besides fashion designers Anita Dongre and Rocky S. We have also done photography- and design-related work for AXE, Kurkure, Micromax. Two things work for us a large network and a platform that allows brands with an opportunity to engage and connect with their audiences at a fraction of cost compared to mass media-led campaigns such as the Me &Meri Maggi (Nestl India) and Hum Mein Hai Hero (Hero MotoCorp), which have been backed by budgets of around Rs 20-30 crore. One doesnt have to spend so much on a Crowd sourcing platform. A platform like Talenthouse allows brands to explore a creative pool of talent that they would otherwise not have been exposed to. They (companies) cant get quality despite the claims of having millions of fans. Take a company that is looking to get its logo
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designed. It needs to go to the platform where people go. We have networks with 300plus design, art, fashion and photography schools in the country, an active base of 12,000 artists, who work with us. You dont need to advertise at all, you need to put, what we call, a creative invite (CI) on our platform. With Micromax, we organised a creative invite to crowdsource its new logo. From the 2,500 entries received, the winning new punch logo was unveiled at the Asia Cup 2012. Airtels popular campaign HarEk Friend ZarooriHotaHai got the required momentum on the digital platform through Talenthouse. Pepsi experimented with designs for its 2012 calendar followed by the Pepsi Football Anthem Video, all done through Talenthouse. How much of the feedback and inputs that you get on a Crowd sourcing platform can be actually depended on? It is authentic when a brand starts using what you have given it. Micromax took its crowd sourced logo and adopted it on its phones. Its also there on each and every media buy that it does. MAMI (Mumbai Film Festival) also declared a winner (through Crowd sourcing) and is using a poster at this years event. Interestingly, some brands are coming back to us after seeing the benefits of the model. See, 90 per cent of our core audience is in the 18-25 age group, most of whom are budding artists going to schools and colleges. Only 10 per cent are professionals who are looking (through Crowd sourcing) for that one big break. Does size matter in this business and does Talenthouse have that critical mass? We have done 370 projects globally and three lakh artiste communities have got engaged with us in various projects. In India, weve 73,000 fans on Facebook, over 70,000 Twitter followers, over 13,000 artists who have engaged with us. Also, our platform is clear that the concept is for the artiste, by the artiste, and so, we dont have a participation cost unlike other platforms that would typically charge some sort of fee. However, theres some cost involved in reaching out to the right kind of people.
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Are there just specific tasks that are best outsourced to crowds? And how can companies distinguish between quality and noise? Any company getting into Crowd sourcing needs to know what it wants out of it. Micromax wanted a final product its brand logo. Similarly, Nerolac wanted a signature tune. Some companies only want viral videos with a flurry of options and looks to choose from. When the crowd gives a brand 100 entries, the brand will get at least 10 good ones. Twenty other entries might have interesting ideas/concepts but could be lacking in one area or the other. Design, photography and music are some of the areas where we get good responses from the crowd. We are now finding many business houses opening up to this phenomenon. Creative Crowd sourcing platforms like Talenthouse, and project-based employment platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk are offering integrated platforms of the internet and digital association, help too. Can you give us some examples to demonstrate the kind of sectors/companies that are using Crowd sourcing initiatives effectively? Crowd sourcing, just like e-commerce, social networking, is here to stay. It may take different avatars. So it can be as simple as someone asking through the status update on Facebook about the latest movie while the crowd contributes with suggestions. Wikipedia is the largest example of Crowd sourcing, Yahoo! Answers India is also a portal where the crowd contributes. In television, shows like Indias Got Talent and Sa Re Ga Ma Pa, for instance, are also where the crowd contributes. Any project that we crowdsource takes six to eight weeks. Brands like Procter & Gamble, for example, claim that more than half of the new product innovations come through its (Crowd sourcing) platform Connect + Develop. Back home, we have seen brands like Mahindra Rise and Lays partner with audiences for product development. From FMCG giants to SMEs, everyone wants to use the Crowd sourcing platform. I would go as far as to say nine out of 10 brands indulge in Crowd sourcing.

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Product design is one of the most popular routes to engage consumers. Opium eye wear, for instance, crowdsourced a sunglass design. Likewise, fashion designers Rocky S and Anita Dongre crowdsourced accessory designs. Even in entertainment, some of the biggest names are open to Crowd sourcing. Music can be created along with lyrics; even the actors for movies can be identified if you crowdsource ideas on the right platform. While Bollywood filmmakers like VidhuVinod Chopra and Vipul Shah have used Talenthouse to tap the smallest of towns for script writers, choreographer Rajeev Surti used the platform to search for an assistant for his film projects. Today, I see many filmmakers reaching out to the masses as creativity can stem from anyone. The next active community will be of the writers. Crowd sourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. In the classic use of the term, problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Usersalso known as the crowdsubmit solutions. Solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place the crowdsourcer. The contributor of the solution is, in some cases, compensated either monetarily, with prizes, or with recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowd sourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization. Those who use Crowd sourcing services, also known as crowdsourcers, are motivated by the benefits of Crowd sourcing, which are that they can gather large numbers of solutions or information and that it is relatively inexpensive to obtain this work. Users are motivated to contribute to crowdsourced tasks by both intrinsic motivations, such as social contact and passing the time, and by extrinsic motivations, such as financial gain. Due to the blurred limits of Crowd sourcing, many collaborative activities, online or not, are being considered Crowd sourcing when they are not. Another consequence of this situation is the proliferation of definitions in the scientific literature. Different

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authors give different definitions of Crowd sourcing according to their specialties, losing in this way the global picture of the term. Concerns for crowdsourcers include: Susceptibility to faulty results caused by targeted, malicious work efforts. Since crowdworkers completing microtasks are paid per task, there is often a financial incentive to complete tasks quickly rather than well. Verifying responses is time consuming, and so requesters often depend on having multiple workers complete the same task to correct errors. However, having each task completed multiple times increases time and monetary costs.Crowdworkers are a nonrandom sample of the population. Many researchers use Crowd sourcing in order to quickly and cheaply conduct studies with larger sample sizes than would be otherwise achievable. However, due to low worker pay, participant pools are skewed towards poor users in developing countries.Ethical concerns. Because crowdworkers are considered independent contractors rather than employees, they are not guaranteed a minimum wage. In practice, workers using the Amazon Mechanical Turk generally earn less than the minimum wage, even in India.Some researchers considering using Mechanical Turk to get participants for studies have argued that this may be unethical. Increased likelihood that a crowdsourced project will fail due to lack of monetary motivation or too few participants. Crowd sourcing markets are not a first-in-first-out queue. Tasks that are not completed quickly may be forgotten, buried by filters and search procedures so that workers do not see them. This results in a long tail power law distribution of completion times.Additionally, low-paying research studies online have higher rates of attrition, with participants not completing the study once started. Even when tasks are completed, Crowd sourcing doesn't always produce quality results. When Facebook began its localization program in 2008, it encountered criticism for the low quality of its crowdsourced translations

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OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

To find out the scope of crowd sourcing in India. To find out the history of crowd sourcing in India. To find out the types of Crowd sourcing in India. To pros and cons of Crowd sourcing inIndia. To find out the manufacturing industry in India. To find out the awareness among the manufacturing companies about crowd sourcing.

To find out the advantages and disadvantages of Crowd sourcing in related to manufacturing industry.

To find out the potential of those, willing to have a crowd sourcing in future.

CHAPTER 2
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LITERATURE REVIEW

Crowd sourcing, a combination of the terms Crowd + Outsourcing, is the practice of companies, business owners or even individuals, making an open call to a broad community of people to help them solve a particular problem. One of the advantages of Crowd sourcing is that it can drive down the cost of solving a problem quite substantially, in addition to being able to receive a huge amount of ideas, suggestions, etc. As an example, say you want to create an eCommerce website about audio books. In this case, your problem is coming up with a nice and catchy name; find an available domain name and a great slogan. Instead of banging your head against the wall and spend a lot of time trying to figure it out for yourself, you can go to sites such as prizes.org and put up a competition, where the best entry gets a prize (normally money). The community over there will then do the work for you and all you have to do is wait for those entries to come in, and pick the best of the best.

As you can see from the example above, Crowd sourcing has a lot of advantages. Combining the power of a massive amount of people providing you with ideas, suggestions, etc., is simply too good to not take advantage of. Now, not everything is a sea of roses. Crowd sourcing, depending on what problem you have, may not be the right way to go. There is no guarantee that the end result will be of good quality (e.g. logo design for example). At the end of the day, it really depends on what solution you are looking for. Crowd sourcing is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. This process can occur both online and offline. The difference between Crowd sourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an
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undefined public rather than a specific body, such as paid employees.Crowd sourcing is related to, but not the same as, human-based computation, which refers to the ways in which humans and computers can work together to solve problems. These two methods can be used together to accomplish tasks. Crowd sourcing is used when companies or entrepreneurs need ideas and proposals from many different sources generally when companies need creativity, innovation or specialized professional skills. By using Crowd sourcing you can gather ideas and suggestions from people around the world and at the same time it is a great brainstorming opportunity for generating new ideas. For example, when companies need new and fresh ideas and perspectives for new product development working with a large group of outside professionals can bring many new insights to the current issues and opportunities. Another common example is when entrepreneurs have good initial ideas for starting a new business but they still need more ideas and business or technical experience to develop a successful business model. Crowd sourcing has started to receive more attention a viable way to innovate in the industry and design and develop products. With the eyes of the nation focusing once again on manufacturing as a key innovation sector in the United States, I thought it would be worth looking at how Crowd sourcing can help the industry. Crowd sourcing Speeds Up Innovation Relying on Crowd sourcing in the manufacturing industry can accelerate the pace of innovation in the industry. By now its pretty well documented that if run properly, Crowd sourcing can bring products to market faster and at a lower cost. Proctor & Gamble tried out Crowd sourcing a while back to find a way to print images onto their Pringles cans. Their search led them to a small Italian bakery that had figured out how to print images onto pastries. Proctor & Gamble licensed the technology and was able to bring their idea to market in a little under a year. Because Crowd sourcing proved successful in this instance, they decided to expand their Crowd sourcing efforts and they currently rely on outside collaboration for a full
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50 percent of their innovations. But theyre not alone; several large companies have started to lean on the wisdom of crowds for production innovation. Among them are companies like Chlorox, 3M, Johnson & Johnson and many others. How to Bring Crowd sourcing into the Mainstream: So why these are companies the exception rather than the rule? Well, it turns out that there are a few roadblocks. The roadblocks are: fear of change, uncertainty about intellectual property rights, and a lack of design sharing technologies. Luckily, each of these obstacles can be overcome. Here are three ways to bring Crowd sourcing into mainstream manufacturing. 1. Start small and work your way up. A lot of manufacturing companies are uneasy about opening up their development process to outside influences. To work around this mentality, companies should start off using Crowd sourcing for a small project to get management used to this method of innovation. After a few successes, they can work their way up to bigger projects. 2. Protect intellectual property by dividing responsibilities. Of course, one of the greatest fears is that opening up product development to outsiders can result in stealing intellectual property and sharing it with competitors. This is a legitimate concern but one that can be mitigated by compartmentalizing roles of the project. By narrowly defining who gets access to what, the problem of intellectual property theft can be managed. 3. Make it easier to share design files. Right now, there is no standard for sharing CAD files because there is no standard software format for the files. This makes it difficult for project collaborators to share their designs with others. Without a way to share files, its pretty tough to change and adapt different designs. Creating a universal standard for CAD files could greatly enhance the potential for Crowd sourcing and collaborative innovation. A few years ago, crowdsource product development really wasnt even part of any discussion on innovation in the manufacturing industry. But times appear to be
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changing. Whether that change can continue, however, is dependent on how well the industry is able to navigate these obstacles. Great ideas are all around us. But great ideas often get lost in the noise because they never reach the right person, or arent transmitted through the right channel. One solution is Crowd sourcingtapping into a broader community, or crowd, to solve a problem or design a new product. Marc Halpern, Vice President of Gartner Manufacturing Industry Advisory Service, recently suggested that Crowd sourcing could fix manufacturing by leaning on crowds for some aspects of product design and development. I caught up with Halpern to learn how Crowd sourcing might work in the manufacturing industry, and what needs to happen before it can gain widespread acceptance. What is a Crowd in Manufacturing? Before diving into how crowds can be tapped for great ideas in manufacturing, Halpern had a distinction to make: not all crowds are created equal. The type of crowd thats useful for product development depends on whats being developed. Designing a t-shirt, for instance, is a far cry from developing a new medical device. In the manufacturing industry, Crowd sourcing is typically best-suited for the engineering, scientific and enthusiast crowd, not (necessarily) the general public. Crowd sourcing Can Speed Up Innovation The manufacturing industry has received a lot of media attention lately for being an essential innovation hub in the United States. According to Halpern, Crowd sourcing can be a great way to accelerate innovation and bring the best mix of ideas to the manufacturing industry. By placing an open call to the community and contracting out the design process, says Halpern, manufacturers can rapidly gather great ideas to bring to market with only a fraction of the effort or investment. Sound far-fetched? Well, Proctor & Gamble gave Crowd sourcing a whirl back in 2002 when the company couldnt figure out how to print images on Pringles cans. To
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solve the problem, they turned to RTC North, a European scientist network. The search led them to a professor-run bakery in Bologna, Italy where the owner had figured out how to use inkjet technologies to print images onto pastries. By licensing this technology, P&G was able to bring this idea to market in just under a year. The experience proved so successful that the company now relies on outside collaboration for up to 50 percent of its innovationsa 40 percent increase since 2002. Crowd sourcing Creates What the Market Wants Beyond improving the exchange of ideas, Crowd sourcing can also be useful for keeping companies in touch with the tenor of the market, says Halpern. Procter & Gamble isnt the only large company seeking the wisdom of crowds for product innovation. Clorox, 3M, Johnson & Johnson and others regularly rely on networks such as Innocentive and YourEncore to crowdsource their product ideas. One of my favorite examples of Crowd sourcing in manufacturing, however, comes from a small company called Local Motors. Local Motors uses Crowd sourcing to design vehicles and then contracts with micro-factories to build them. They recently made big news when they won a Department of Defense competition to build a combat vehicle. Next up, theyre Crowd sourcing the design of an electric car. With gas prices on the rise, Crowd sourcing an affordable electric car design could create the market innovation that meets current green consumer demands. Three Ways to Make Crowd sourcing Mainstream If Crowd sourcing has been successful for these companies, why arent manufacturers embracing it even more? As it turns out, Halpern explained, there are three obstacles that need to be overcome before Crowd sourcing can become mainstream: fear of change, intellectual property issues, and a lack of design sharing technologies. Halpern shared three strategies for overcoming these obstacles. 1. Ease into Crowd sourcing for idea creation. Historically, many manufacturers have taken the attitude that if it wasnt invented within the four walls, an idea didnt merit consideration. This can be a tough
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change management issue to tackle. One piece of advice Halpern offered is to start using Crowd sourcing with a fringe product that isnt core to the business. These products can be used as a training ground for managers to get used to the approach, explains Halpern. After a few successes, they might get bolder about introducing more products through Crowd sourcing. 2. Divide projects to protect intellectual property (IP). IP theft is a big concern in the manufacturing industry. Whats to stop an outside party that collaborates with Proctor & Gamble from taking those ideas and collaborating with Clorox? Compartmentalizing roles in the project can help limit the problem of information sharing. For instance, a manufacturer may want to crowdsource just the fuel cell for a car but keep the rest of the car design proprietary. To protect the IP of the car design, manufacturers can limit information by narrowly defining crowdsourced project roles and information access. 3. Create a single file sharing system for design files. There is a broad ecosystem of computer-aided design (CAD) software out there, with each system running its own flavor of XML code. This makes it difficult to share design files with collaborators. While creating a universal standard for CAD programs is beyond the reach of any one manufacturer, the industry as a group could push for format standardization. In Halperns view, creating a standard format and standard environment that everyone could use would go a long way toward enabling more Crowd sourcing projects in manufacturing. A few years ago, Crowd sourcing product design and development in the industry wasnt even a topic of conversation. This year, Local Motors is hosting a competition to design a car that they'll build at the International Manufacturing Technology Show. The fact that its being openly debated in the manufacturing communityand actively used by Fortune 500 companiesindicates that there is
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movement afoot in the industry. Whether that movement continues depends on how well these obstacles are addressed. As enterprise businesses embrace Crowd sourcing in an increasing number of ways, manufacturers are poised to benefit from the distributed problem solving the crowd provides. In fact, many big-name manufacturers are already using the crowd, including Proctor & Gamble, Clorox, Johnson & Johnson, Fiat and many others. From design to research and development, the crowd offers any manufacturer the ability to do the following:

Innovate Research new concepts Design new products Fine tune designs and concepts

Crowd sourcing to innovate While employees have historically been the force behind innovation, the crowd gives manufacturers a way to think outside the box. Crowd sourcing allows businesses to tap into a broader supply of talent instead of letting innovation be restricted by the ideas, concepts and abilities of in-house employees. Crowd workers give a new perspective and new ideas come with that perspective. Crowd sourcing to research new concepts: No business can continue to thrive in todays marketplace without creating new products or services because what they do not provide, competitors will. Using the crowd to evaluate new concepts helps any manufacturer learn more about the viability of taking something from the idea phase to the development phase. With the crowd, these evaluations come from the very people who are likely to use a companys products.
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Crowd sourcing to design new products: No one knows what consumers want better than consumers themselves. By tapping into the power of the crowd to design products with existing concepts in place, manufacturers position themselves to create much more market-friendly products. Using the crowd to design the look and feel of a product creates a product that is more in tune with what consumers want. Crowd sourcing to fine tune design and concepts: Once a product has gone through the idea phase and progressed past the initial development phase, it is likely to require many adjustments before going to market. Crowd sourcing products at this stage lets manufacturers get feedback from potential customers. Like the benefit crowd workers provide in the initial design phase, they can offer suggestions on everything from color or material choice to the location or function of product features. Considerations for manufacturers who crowdsource: To maximize the effectiveness of Crowd sourcing within the manufacturing industry, businesses can do several things. First, they should start small by testing the concept of Crowd sourcing for a smaller business problem before tackling a larger one. If the results are beneficial, businesses can then expand their use of the crowd. Second, businesses must consider the protection of intellectual property. This concern is eliminated by breaking up projects into microtasks, where delimited pieces protect IP by not showing any crowd worker the whole picture.However, focusing on the title of Dereks post, about ways to make Crowd sourcing mainstream in manufacturing, its useful repost some of my older material. Specifically, using eCommerce as a means to think about how to make Crowd sourcing mainstream in any industry. Online commerce is mainstream now for many reasons, but primarily the list below on the left.

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ECommerce

Paid Crowd sourcing

1. Huge on-demand selection 2. Saves time and effort 3. Satisfactory Results 4. Best Price 5. Secure and Private

1. Crowd Responsiveness 2. Ease of Use 3. Satisfactory Results 4. Cost Advantage 5. Security / Privacy

It stands to reason that shopping for work done via an online on-demand workforce would need to meet these same criteria to become mainstream. In particular, the crowd needs to match the need, and payment rate needs to drive quality and timely response. Free Crowd sourcing Free Crowd sourcing in development, design; content creation, content review, question answering, etc. is represented successfully in successful mega-examples like Wikipedia and Linux. And, it will continue to grow and evolve as a viable means to get productive work done by the crowd. It differs from Paid Crowd sourcing in that work gets accomplished only if its entertaining, emotionally fulfilling, or leads to recognition. Other work will simply not get done. To drive this point home, here are a few simple examples:

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Paid Crowd sourcing vendors provide business people with tools that ensure their work is completed by someone in a timely fashion, at equal or better quality than a full-time workforce. They enable the provision of monetary incentives along with other incentives, like recognition, that improve the likelihood of getting satisfactory results in a timely fashion. The vast majority of work we need addressed would not qualify as fun, therefore, paid Crowd sourcing is the path to mainstream. It should come as no surprise that the lions share of mature Crowd sourcing examples is in the design and web development field. Clearly understood deliverables and lots of fun and recognition incentives (as well as being a good means to compete for clients) increase the likelihood of satisfactory results and reduce the need for high pay rates.

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Scope of crowd sourcing in India: Great souls have wills; just weak desires. Internet has given us new openings for communication and exchange of information that properly use sabrsele important contributor to business, especially its apparatus towards developing projects, administrative information on topics that favor it. In recent years, the new wave of the Internet known as Web 2.0 or Participatory Web has evolved to facilitate the collaboration of users without expertise in online projects. The importance of Crowd sourcing is the possibility that a large number of enthusiastic participants can perform the job of a small group of experienced professionals. The title of the report by Jeff Howe-Crowd sourcing.com-es. The Rise of Crowd sourcing (The Rise of Crowd sourcing) Wikipedia has been a big bet on the scope, use and advantages of Crowd sourcing. In this respect reminds us that Crowd sourcing is a term coined by writer Jeff Howe and editor Mark Robinson of the technology magazine Wired. Just as in outsourcing jobs are sent to outside companies to cut costs in cheaper markets such as India or China, what does is propose Crowd sourcing problems and rewards the person or persons proposed to solve the problem. Crowd is the English term crowd sourcing refers to raw material procurement (where source is the source term in English, in this case a project). The attempt to replace the contracts Crowd sourcing selective and specific training workforces by the massive participation of volunteers and the application of principles of self-organization. Although this is not a new idea, it is becoming quite popular and has been applied by companies such as Boeing, DuPont and Procter & Gamble, which seek to solve their problems through massive initiatives such as InnoCentive. This is a different collaborative model of open source projects, known as Open source, where the benefit is mutual collaboration among employees. The resolution of open source brings together people from around the world via the Internet to create complex software like the Linux kernel, MySQL database and browser Mozilla, among others. It gives us that Wikipedia is perhaps the best known of Crowd sourcing project open source, but there are many other types of work crowdsource: Nextiam is a portal for
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interaction between companies that require some type of professional service and thousands of people who have time and creative talent to provide a satisfactory answer to this need. Worthidea is a multicultural and multilingual platform of ideas that serves as a meeting point between companies and users. Companies can present their problems or areas of improvements for users to help them. Users can record any ideas that are making money with it and the possibility that a reality. Procter and Gamble employs more than 9000 scientists and researchers in corporate R & D and still have many problems that cannot solve. They now publish their terrible headaches on a site called InnoCentive, offering large sums of money to more than 90,000 solvers who have their support network of scientists. P & G also works with NineSigma, and Yet2 YourEncore. Amazon does something similar with projects of large scale software. iStockphoto is a site of over 22,000 amateur photographers who raise and distribute stock's photo. Because we do not have the high cost of a professional team as Getty Images, you can buy images for a low cost. This company was purchased by Getty Images. Cambrian House is a headquarter of iStockphoto in Calgary, Canada, and is described as open source money. They are an incubator that discovers and markets software and ideas through Crowd sourcing. Taxpayers earning royalties and share the profits of the product. Portucuenta is a freelance programmer portal in Spanish, which allows developing projects of any scale to have an available pool of programmers who can be assigned different tasks and then be integrated. Pajamanation community portal is a freelance international pajamaworkers in Spanish and English, you can publish microtrabajos that need to be completed, and in turn allows the nomination of candidates pajamaworkers to the publisher, in order to get the microtrabajo. Pajamanation is a pool of available pajamaworkersmicrotrabajos and over 58 pases.Concretamente is a practice of Web 2.0, ie the social web, based on collective intelligence and the role of the public that not only looks but puts the contents. Examples are classical and encyclopedia Wikipedia and YouTube video site. Crowd sourcing indicates participation and also shows the relationship with another familiar word: outsourcing, custom work of an enterprise but outside it, looking for a lower
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cost. As exposed. Linkedin.com /, Crowd sourcing goes hand in technology, therefore the future growth you have is pure. As far as corporate culture or wisdom, it tends to be very conservative and low risk for what will become of the last areas to use this type of collaboration. Yes it would be very convenient to use Crowd sourcing to solve specific corporate issues such as Taifa Kingdoms existing large corporations especially in Crowd sourcing contracts intended to substitute selective and specific training workforces by the massive participation of volunteers and the application selforganizing principles. Crowd sourcing represents the act of a company to take a role that could ever be made by employees and outsourced to a network (usually large and not defined) of persons in the form of a call or open defiance of a reward. As corporations are innovative and understand the power of Crowd sourcing, technological tools, Internet, social networks, etc. Will generate and raise the Crowd sourcing as an invaluable business tool. History of crowd sourcing in India: There are many different Crowd sourcing models in use today. Two of the most common involve one-time activities and on-going communities. Contests are a popular example of a one-time activity (for example, create a new advertisement, design a new logo, propose a new packaging concept). Ongoing communities typically involve groups of customers or passionate individuals for a particular brand. Companies interested in Crowd sourcing might get their feet wet by first engaging in some onetime activities. This is made easier today since there are many intermediaries that can facilitate contests. Ongoing communities probably involve the most planning since they are a long term proposition. In any case, serious companies are carefully thinking about ways to integrate Crowd sourcing into their marketing efforts. Merits and drawbacks of Crowd sourcing:

Theoretically, Crowd sourcing promises several benefits. It is a way to directly interact with customers. Usually input can be obtained faster and cheaper than
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traditional market research. And, importantly, fresh ideas from a large and diverse group outside the company can be obtained. Issues include protecting intellectual property (who owns the ideas), everything is public (competitors can see what a rival is up to), appropriately motivating participation (love, money, glory), and the potential for a community to become an echo chamber (where everyone essentially has the same perspective and there is no diversity). A big practical issue for companies using Crowd sourcing is how to efficiently evaluate all the input that it typically generates (much of which is noise). Dells IdeaStorm is one of the longest running on-going communities for new product ideas. Lego Cuusoo has received a lot of popular press attention for how it has been able to co-create new products with its customers. IBM is very pleased with its IdeaJam (crowdstorming), and Cisco with its iPrize. Threadless (tee-shirts) is wellknown for its successful Crowd sourcing business model. Finally, Innocentive has probably received the most attention in the form of many articles, case studies, and academic research. Crowd sourcing marketing communications such as advertising has received a lot of popular press attention for some brands. Right now I know of many more applications involving product innovation. This is probably true. In my opinion, some companies made a splash by allowing the public to create new advertisements for their brands. However, most of these campaigns were short lived, and in many cases, the company has not repeated these contests. Like the history of most business buzz words, companies want to be perceived that they are on the leading edge. I believe that Crowd sourcing has potential in some circumstances, but companies need to think how it can be integrated into their usual activities. The real power of these new tools comes from rethinking normal business processes. Lower costs are often the reason many companies first become interested in Crowd sourcing. Having a voluntary workforce is certainly appealing. However, speed of getting input and the potential for fresh ideas (that might be more original and creative than those from inside the company) are also important drivers.
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Some new entrepreneurial businesses are based entirely on Crowd sourcing. The US government, for example, has made available several important databases that clever entrepreneurs are using to develop new mobile phone apps. Crowd sourcing is a new label for some very old activities. For example, the Statue of Liberty in New York was funded by small donations from the American and French people (early crowdfunding). The British government offered the Longitude Prize in 1714 for anyone inventing a method of determining longitude on the high seas. Today, Crowd sourcing as we know it is possible because of the internet and the connections between individuals. Crowd sourcing tasks (like reCAPTCHA) is well embedded in some of our everyday activities, and the Xprize Foundation has achieved a lot of success by offering prizes for major scientific accomplishments. Right now, I think that marketings use of Crowd sourcing is still in the exploratory stages. As I noted above, Crowd sourcing is not really new. Public contests have a long history. With respect to focus groups, Crowd sourcing is usually faster and cheaper. More important, Crowd sourcing allows for freer communication and better input than focus groups. Finally, Crowd sourcing can tap into a more diverse population of interested individuals. Of course, in neither case are the resulting samples necessarily representative of a companys customer base. Advantages and disadvantages of Crowd sourcing in related to manufacturing industry: So, that's fine in theory. But how does it work in the advertising industry? Well, a good example of that is the current Victors & Spoils agency model. It is, in fact, the first ad agency to be built on Crowd sourcing principles.A typical project for a client involves just what you'd expect from an ad agency, including:

An account director or AE A strategy director A creative director A production department

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It's all housed in an office building, too. This isn't a virtual landscape. The big difference however is the creative department. This is crowdsourced, which means that every project that comes into the ad agency is outsourced to the crowd. Putting the Crowd in Crowd sourcing: What's the crowd? Well, it's a seemingly endless supply of freelance talent that lives out there in the world, ready to work on any jobs that come along. They include:

Art directors Copywriters Producers Designers Writers Strategists

Victors & Spoils maintains a database counting hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of creative, and they will access this database as and when they need work producing. A creative brief will be issued to the crowd, the ideas will come flooding in, and directions are chosen from the ideas the agency receives. The Advantages of Crowd sourcing: There are many. 1. The overhead is lower. You only pay for creative people when you need them, and even then, you only pay people if their ideas are chosen. Plus, there are no benefits to pay, vacation hours and so on.

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2.

The talent pool is huge. An ad agency built on Crowd sourcing can choose from thousands of available creatives.

3.

It allows an agency to grow and shrink as needed. IN these tough times, agencies are laying off creative staff and working with a skeleton crew. When times get better, more creatives are hired. But with Crowd sourcing, the creative department grows and shrinks to accommodate each job.

4.

The work, theoretically, is fresher. You can have different teams working on the same client for years, rather than tapping a select few times and draining the creative well dry.

5.

You have access to international talent. The barriers are gone, you can team up a writer in India with a designer in Japan, all via cloud computing.

6.

Great collaboration across multiple disciplines, languages and age ranges.

The Darker Side of Crowd sourcing: Unfortunately, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In this case, what's good for one agency is not necessarily good for them all. And it's even worse for the talent pool out there. Major issues include: 1. Talent is only paid for chosen ideas. This means that dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people are working for free in the hope of having their idea chosen. This devalues creative talent enormously. 2. Other traditional agencies find it hard to compete. Not unlike the Shawshank Redemption, in which the prison inmates could build a railroad for a fraction of the price of a regular business, Crowd sourcing is hard to beat. Does that make it wrong? No. But it does skew the marketplace in favor of freelanceonly business models, which could be very bad news for creative careers.
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3.

Wages average out to fall well below average, for the lucky ones who actually have their ideas chosen.

4.

Greater probability of failure. Creative departments in the world's top agencies are staffed with the best minds. The talent pool that remains is not comprised of the top-level talent, as 99% of those are employed. Crowdsourcing sacrifices an expensive A-team for a much cheaper B-team.

5.

A breakdown of working relationships. As creatives change on each job, it's tough to build solid relationships with reliable staff.

6.

No accountability. With no contracts and low (or no) wages, the creative team will always be on the lookout for the bigger, better deal. When they take it, the agency is left bag.

Types of Crowd sourcing in India: There are multiple approaches to Crowd sourcing. Some depend upon active collaboration within virtual community of individuals, while others benefit from the opposite. For example, prediction markets maximize value not through collaboration, but from minimal interaction between participants. Crowd Creation Perhaps, the best known forms of Crowd sourcing are creation activities such asking individuals to film TV commercials, perform language translation or solve challenging scientific problems. Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems stated that No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else. Examples of Crowd Creation include:

National Audubon Societys eBird Amateur birdwatchers report findings and migratory patterns

NASAs Clickworkers Space enthusiasts categorize crater patterns on Mars

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Threadless.com Creative consumers propose new T-Shirt ideas for sale on the site

iStockPhoto Amateur photographers contribute high quality stock photography images

Innocentive Connects research organizations with a global community of scientists

TopCoder Holds competitions to encourage creative software development Linux Open source operating system developed by community of avid programmers

In explaining the creative crowd phenomenon, Howe references the now-famous New Yorker cartoon that states On the Internet no one knows you are a dog, which is a key principle of Crowd sourcing. No one knows you dont hold a degree in organic chemistry or that you are not a professional photographer. Gone are pedigree, race, gender, age and qualification with the only criteria remaining to be the quality of work itself. Crowd sourcing can be effective not only for sourcing new writing,

photography, music and film, but for solving real-world scientific problems. Howe explains that most of the brightest people in research organizations attended the same universities and therefore leverage similar heuristics for problem solving. Lack of experience is often a key ingredient required for breakthrough thinking.

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Crowd Voting Crowd Voting leverages the communitys judgment to organize, filter and stack-rank content such as newspaper articles, music and movies. It is the most popular form of Crowd sourcing, which generates the highest levels of participation. Howe cites the 1:10:89 Rule, which states that out of 100 people

1% will create something valuable 10% will vote and rate submissions 89% will consume creation
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For 10% that vote and rate content the act of consumption was itself an act of creation. The Internet offers various mechanisms to perform voting ratings of articles by endusers or computer-driven algorithms that assess popularity via links and page views. Googles search engine is built upon the principle of Crowd Voting. Reality TV shows offer another example of Crowd Voting. Howe calls American Idol the largest focus group ever conducted, Threadless.com uses crowd voting to decide which T-shirts to manufacture and sell on its web

site. Consequently,Threadless.com is able to gauge end-consumer demand for new products before making investment decisions on new SKUs. Threadless is able to avoid the Power Laws that typically apply to hit-driven industries such as fast-fashion and entertainment. Crowd Wisdom The Wisdom of Crowds principle attempts to harness many peoples knowledge in order to solve problems or predict future outcomes or help direct corporate strategy. How states that given the right set of conditions the crowd will almost always outperform any number of employees a fact that many companies are increasingly attempting to exploit. Studies by Caltech professor Scott E Page confirm that even concentrated groups of highly intelligence people are consistently outperformed by crowds. Examples of crowd wisdom include idea jams and prediction markets such as the Iowa Elections Market, Hollywood Stock

Exchangeand SIM Exchange. Crowd Funding Crowd-Funding circumvents the traditional corporate establishment to offer financing to individuals or groups that might otherwise be denied credit or opportunity. Two groups of typically under-funded populations include individuals in developing nations and amateur musicians. Kiva, a microlending portal, offers an example of Crowd sourcing. Kiva provides a marketplace for aspiring entrepreneurs in

developing nations to seek out financing for projects that is not readily available in
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their home markets. Sellaband offers a similar value proposition to Garage bands that have been turned down by the major record labels in Hollywood. Manufacturing industry in India: The manufacturing industry has taken off in India mainly because the country has all the requisite skills in product, process and capital engineering. The manufacturing history in India is expansive while the education system has also boosted the industry. Plus, the cheap, skilled manpower has attracted an array of foreign companies, (in diverse industries) to set shop here. Add to this, the sheer size of the Indian market! By 2025, India is likely to become the fifth largest consumer market in the world, according to a research by McKinsey Global Institute. India also offers abundant engineering and technical manpower; the country churns out nearly 400,000 graduate engineers every year. A large number of companies are shifting their manufacturing base to India to make the best of its labor cost advantage, English-speaking workforce, democratic regime and other advantages. The country has the largest number of companies, outside of Japan, that have been recognised for excellence in quality. Lately, the manufacturing industry has been witnessing a positive overall growth across spectrum. This can be said on the basis of the Industrial Outlook survey that was conducted by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for 2010 on the Indian manufacturing sector. The results showed positive overall business sentiment in the year.According to Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) - ASCON survey, 41 out of 121 sectors in the manufacturing industry are estimated to grow at 20 per cent or more in the current financial year as against 34 sectors that had reported such growth during the last financial year. As per UNIDOs new report titled Yearbook of Industrial Statistics 2010, India has emerged as one of the worlds top 10 countries in industrial production, while as per the report 2010 Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index, by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and the US Council on Competitiveness, India has ranked second for its manufacturing competence.

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The Mechanics of Change: However, the contribution of the manufacturing industry to the GDP is significantly low. For the Indian economy to successfully distribute wealth across its population, manufacturing has to grow from its current 17 percent share of GDP to a number closer to 30 percent (which is the standard for most developed economies). However, for that to happen, the industry needs to wean itself from its labor cost advantage and focus instead on markedly improving the efficiency of its operations through technology. Currently, the manufacturing sector is merely warming up to the idea of technology but the adoption is slow in comparison to its counterparts in developed economies. Lack of awareness of global technologies, and trends in Manufacturing IT has also contributed to this low adoption.

Today when most exporters are looking forward to unshackled growth, their first step has been to completely overhaul existing machinery, putting in place

imported machines that offer productivity levels that are six or seven times higher than those of Indian machines.

Significant increase in productivity and quality at the plant levels Pursuit of worldwide competitive manufacturing strategies and operations

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Successful

integration

into

the

global

supply

chains

Government initiatives towards making the manufacturing sector more attractive: Creation of National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council (NMCC) to help develop national strategies with regard to technology and academic leadership

Issuance of the new Consolidated Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) policy document with more leeway

Retained stability in indirect taxes leading to capacity building

This, however, is but a small step in the larger scheme of things. In todays business environment, manufacturers must increase productivity through the entire supply chain - this necessitates that real-time data from the plant floor be made available to their ERP, SCM, and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) systems. There is need for an Intelligent Networked Manufacturing (INM) vision, entailing an Ethernet to the Factory solution that allows for the integration of plant floor data with business systems, providing employees with access to the information as and when they need it. While this improves business efficiencies and decision-making abilities on one hand, more importantly it enables manufacturers to obtain visibility to the factory floor without disrupting the production line. By scaling business through innovative investments and practices, alongwith adoption of technology, Indian manufacturing is slated to become a hallmark of manufacturing prowess in the future. Growth Barriers: FICCI estimates that the higher input costs for the Indian manufacturing sector as a result of cascading effect of indirect taxes on selling prices of commodities, higher cost of utilities like power, railway transport, water, higher cost of finance and high
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transactions costs puts the sector at a severe disadvantage as compared to its Asian counterparts. To accelerate growth and improve competitiveness of the Indian manufacturing industry, the industry must allow entry of more private sector investors in important infrastructure sectors like electricity distribution, aviation, roads, railways, ports. A new bill for improving Indias labor laws including encouraging contract labour will serve the industry better. Over and above more conducive government regulation, what the Indian manufacturing sector needs is a productivity boost. CEOs of some of Indias leading export firms on visits to China have come away impressed at the efficiency per employee and the dawning realization that current productivity of their factories is half to one third levels of what might otherwise be achievable. Exports of manufactured goods in India accounted for 75% in comparison to exports of manufactured goods all over the world. Owing to the performance manifested by the export sector in India, the scenario indicates that there is less competition in the manufacturing segment. Absence of competition is also established by the fact that in spite of reducing the tariff in the early and mid 90s, India continued to be one of the protected economies of the world. Contribution of India's export towards international market grew from 05% to 0.7% during 1990 to 2000. During the same period, Malaysia, China, Thailand and South Korea, registered almost double increase in exports. Awareness among the manufacturing companies about crowd sourcing: The recent uproar surrounding the introduction and then demise of Gaps new logo has sparked vibrant discussion on the merits and risks of crowd-sourcingor more specifically listening to customers and critics.A few weeks ago, Gap introduced a new logo on their Facebook page with nary a peep of warning or consultation. The initial reaction among observers was swift and fairly uniform harsh criticism. The Gap folks tried to address the situation with a belated invitation for consumer input call it
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reactive crowd-sourcing which only fanned the flames of critics and confused observers. Think of it as bad buzz. Subsequent updates by Gap positioned the new logo as a broader brand update, and provided more background on the rationale and strategy. But in a fascinating twist, a survey several days after the initial buzz confirmed that few consumers were aware of the new brand or related online polemic. Gap ultimately announced they heard the feedback and scrapped the new logo design; it appears they have learned their lesson and will tread carefully in future brand changes. (For another example of a rebranding effort gone wrong witness the debacle by Tropicana, which surprised consumers with a new packaging look that was harshly criticized and eventually scrapped.) There are several lessons communication and marketing pros can take from this story:

If you are truly committed to listen to online consumers or fans have a crowdsourcing plan and a system to back it up. Confirm how you will gather feedback and what you will do with it before opening the doors to input and ideas. Define rules of the game to manage expectations and legal/copyright issues. Most important, be prepared to respond and take action based on what you hear.

Make listening and monitoring of relevant sites a constant activity rather than an ad-hoc, reactive event. That will provide solid context for dissecting the scope and potential impact of any feedback.

Consider getting input before you make any changes to products or brands. That makes the process more credible and relevant for consumers.

Know who/where your fans and customers areand make sure you arealways listening to them. There was interesting debate around the Gap issue about whether the logo uproar was truly a broad, grass-roots reaction from fans and customers or just a brush fire from a small but vocal group of malcontents in the design community.

Have a brand strategy and stick to it. Yesconsumers own the brand, since their perceptions are ultimately the reality and determine brand equity. And many
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passionate fans feel they have personal ownership of favored products or brands. But no brand can survive without careful management by inside folks who are trying to blend identity, marketing, products and PR to drive the business. Ive heard a few executives and peers whisper that the Gap episode provides further evidence that social media is risky and perhaps even counterproductive. I disagree. The problem here wasnt with social media though listening and dialogue has exploded with the advent of new technology but with faulty strategy and planning. The famous Coke Classic fiasco happened years ago without the prominent presence of Facebook or blogs. The issue now is that criticism can spread much wider and faster than years ago which puts more onus on active monitoring, smart planning and ongoing dialogue with customers. An excellent article in AdAge focusing on social media screw-ups (which goes beyond crowd-sourcing) suggests that such missteps are inevitable despite increasing efforts by companies to listen and learn due to the rapid pace of evolution in communication technology. On a final note, I enjoyed this video post by my friend Paul Walker at the PulsePoint Group on crowd-sourcing projects that worked welland why they did. It reminds us of the potential benefits of crowd-sourcing including consumer/employee engagement, lower cost, innovation and speed-to-market which to my mind greatly outweigh the risks. Potential of those, willing to have a crowd sourcing in future: Crowd sourcing is one of those concepts that have competing definitions. On one hand, Crowd sourcing is an engagement method whereby organizations (such as cities, brands and entrepreneurs) seek input from communities of people. These

communities can be open or closed, homogenous or diverse. Participants are invited to contribute ideas, solutions, or support in an open process whereby the elements of creativity, competition and campaigning are reinforced through social media to come up with more powerful ideas or solutions than could be obtained through other means. Ideation is also used to as a term to describe this concept or process. Citizen engagement, open innovation and ideation are terms that are also used.

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Crowd sourcing can also be defined as the division of labour by a distributed, multidimensional workforce, (sometimes paid sometimes volunteer), motivated to accomplish a set of tasks that combined together to achieve an overall goal or solve a problem. This motivation can be financial, reputation building, or part of being a good citizen of a particular community (ie. computer programmer). In a Bloomberg Businessweek article, Crowd sourcing: Consumers as Creators, Paul Boutin writes:Crowd sourcing is a subset of what Eric von Hippel calls user-centered innovation, in which manufacturers rely on customers not just to define their needs, but to define the products or enhancements to meet them. But unlike the bottom-up, ad-hoc communities that develop open-source software or better windsurfing gear, crowdsourced work is managed and owned by a single company that sells the results. To paraphrase von Hippel, it relies on would-be customers willingness to hand over their ideas to the company, either cheaply or for free, in order to see them go into production for the benefit of themselves and other customers. Risk and perspective Risk, always, is viewed from two perspectives: those running a Crowd sourcing initiative, and those participating in one. While this article is written for those thinking of running a Crowd sourcing initiative, we thought we should address the fact that risk is also something participants think of as well. Participant risk The risks participants should be aware of include:

Privacy Make sure your information is secure and used by the intended party only. This includes personal and financial information. Checking to make sure the site you are visiting has SSL certificates active, does not redirect you to unknown URLs (web addresses), and is not asking for information that you dont feel comfortable giving.
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Reputation Make sure you are dealing with authentic and transparent organizations. You wouldnt want to be involved with an organization that is up to no good away from the Internet; so being aware of who is running an online engagement makes sense.

Intellectual Property If you participate in a Crowd sourcing or open innovation initiative, make sure the ideas or comments you contribute are your own and not taken from someone else that might be upset you were passing them off as yours. Ideas are open for everyone to contribute but some sites allow you to contribute product ideas that might have a financial reward associated to them and misrepresentation can get you into trouble.

Organizer risk As someone who is looking at using Crowd sourcing, the first thing to keep in mind is that whether you are a brand, a city, or other organization your crowd is already talking about you. A quick search of social media properties and traditional forums will give you the sense that for good or bad, people are talking about you behind your back. The risk of providing a place for this conversation to happen where you can monitor and benefit from it outweighs the risk of not doing so. Understanding Crowd sourcing risks Most social and business practices arent risk-free, and neither is Crowd sourcing. It can be a useful tool that can be used by individuals, citizens, or any organization or company in any industry. However, before diving into a Crowd sourcing initiative, you should evaluate and address certain risks to protect your brand and the integrity of your organization. As with all endeavours, risk is measured on the Risk Reward continuum that is inherent for each organization.

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Evaluating risk tolerance Successfully engaging the crowd means opening up your doors to new people, perspectives, ideas, and solutions to problems and other things they want to share with your organization. To start, ask yourself a few simple questions to help you set the strategy:

Question 1: What am I trying to achieve with this initiative and what is the reward?

Question 2: Is the crowd I am trying to attract external (open) or internal (closed)? Question 3: Am I able to trust a vendor to take care of this risk or does my organizations prefer to manage it directly?

For many organizations, Crowd sourcing may seem too risky. This perceived risk can often get in the way of open innovation and Crowd sourcing. In the article 2 Ways to Reduce Open Innovation Risk: Convert the Naysayers and Bring on the Seasoned Veterans, Jackie Hutter, IP Strategist, writes: In order to be successful (and not only have a single chance to try Open Innovation), one must be able to navigate the corporate politics that would stop the process, as well being able to minimize the risk associated with going outside for new product ideas. I think I have a solution to each of these concerns. The Risks As we discussed, Crowd sourcing risks should be looked at with perspective in mind. The following table lists risk to all parties for two types of Crowd sourcing initiatives.The first type of Crowd sourcing is that focused on open innovation the aspect that is the most commonly used in industry and is the basis for the first instances of using the crowd to complete tasks and come up with solutions to problems that are technical in nature. The second type focuses on using this methodology for engaging citizens whether it be a city, a province or state or
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country to not only solve problems, but also gauge support and refine solutions for a particular community based challenge. This could be policies, programs, etc. The risks of Crowd sourcing Crowd Crowd sourcing for Open Innovation sourcing for Citizen

Engagement

Lack Reduced internal capacity for innovation

of

resources

for

proper

management of campaign

Gamification by special interest groups or Gamification by special interest groups individuals or individuals trying to rig the voting

Controversy over IP ownership after idea Confusion by the crowd caused by lack is submitted of clarity in campaign

Confusion by the crowd caused by lack Participation is low due to lack of of clarity in campaign awareness of the engagement initiative

Distrust among community caused by past experiences lack of followOriginality of idea (relates to ownership through by those running the campaign mentioned above) in the past.

Campaign for innovation is not set-up to allow the organization to respond in a timely manner

Low

participation

due

to

lack

of

awareness of open innovation initiative

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The crowd stops participating due to the perception the organization is nonresponsive to their input Risk: Crowd sourcing does not solve your organizations problem Some of the biggest companies in the world rely on Crowd sourcing. Starbucks, Nokia, Dell, IBM, Netflix and many, many more organizations have successfully used Crowd sourcing in a number of ways. Some of the greatest innovations at these organizations have come from the ideas brought forward by the crowd. However, in order for Crowd sourcing to work, the crowd needs to know what you expect from them and the project needs to be much focused. Your organizations culture plays a major role in the success of Crowd sourcing. In a New York Times article by Steve Lohr, The Crowd is Wise (When its Focused), Lohr wrote about the importance of corporate culture: Opening the corporate doors to ideas and inspiration from the collective crowd holds great potential, but there are pitfalls, warns Henry Chesbrough, executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. To succeed, Mr. Chesbrough said, a company must have a culture open to outside ideas and a system for vetting and acting on them.In business, its not how many ideas you have, he observed. What matters is how many ideas you translate into products and services. Risk: The crowd doesnt have the answer Many organizations dont feel that the ideas offered by the crowd will actually solve the problem at hand or lead to innovation suitable for investment. The solution to your problem isnt always going to be found within the walls of your organization. Organizations are expected to do more with less, and that often means fewer employees. In the article 2 Ways to Reduce Open Innovation Risk: Convert the Naysayers and Bring on the Seasoned Veterans, Hutter writes:
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Because of this extreme downsizing, however, the experienced coaches and seasoned players are not on the usual playing fields; that is, they are not in the corporations where they learned their crafts (on someone elses dime). Moreover, many of them presumably the best and most entrepreneurial of themare not sitting on the sidelines after being cut from the corporate teams for which they have been playing for many years. Risk: Failure to participate Some people worry that Crowd sourcing is that shiny new thing that everyone wants to be part of at the beginning, and the hype will die down a few campaigns in. Crowd sourcing isnt new. The term itself has been around for six years or so, but organizations had been using various forms of Crowd sourcing before then. Look at the longevity of Crowd sourcing projects like My Starbucks Idea, Dells Ideastorm and Nokias IdeasProject. These projects continue to receive widespread support from their crowds and they have all been around (and producing results) for many years. One of the things each of these organizations does well is communicate with their crowd. These groups promote ideas that have become a reality and the crowd that they are listening and that their ideas do have value. Simple tasks such as commenting on ideas and getting in on the conversation help to build deeper relationships. These relationships help build loyal crowd members, who in turn get involved in more projects and share projects with their own crowds. Risk: Crowd sourcing takes too much time People worry that projects will take too much time to complete if Crowd sourcing introduced to the process because of the large number of people involved and the number of submissions received. In many organizations, they think that it will just be easier to limit participation to a team in the company or the company as a whole because there are fewer ideas to deal with and decisions can be made faster. However, just because you can move through a process faster, doesnt mean the solution is going to be the best one. There are two ways to address the time issue:
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Different projects require different response times Create contest type projects that have time deadlines attached to them.

In addition to these options, youll also want to develop a plan for handling submissions so that they are all reviewed in a timely manner. If needed, set deadlines and work backwards to figure out which activities you need to complete and when. This will help you stay organized and keep the Crowd sourcing project on track.For time-sensitive projects, Crowd sourcing can be used to bring large groups of people and information together in a short period of time. Using social media to leverage your Crowd sourcing project allows you to cast a wide net, reaching your crowd to solve a problem/find an answer.Crowd sourcing focuses on small asks, where people often have an easier time of relating to the project or getting their head around it in order to support it to the level they wish. Reaching a wider range of people through Crowd sourcing and social media often means that projects can be funded on time. Risk: Idea theft Another thing organizations often worry about is idea theft. Ideas are only ideas until they are executed. Sometimes an organization may not have the resources to execute the ideas. While some companies will modify ideas to put their own spin on them in order to make them a reality. Risk: Maintaining privacy Many of the Crowd sourcing platforms use technical security measures such as SSL certificates when they develop their platforms to protect the privacy of those that participate in the campaigns run by our clients. Because platforms often closely integrate with clients websites, making sure they are developed properly in order protect privacy is taken seriously from the start.

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Risk: Gaming the system There are many ways to try and prevent gaming of the system but there it can be a balancing act. Restricting access to people you know (ie. log in to access a campaign) is one option, but the problem with this is that you risk narrow your crowd, which isnt not always desired for the campaign you are running. The crowd also does a fairly good job of preventing people from trying to gain the system by reporting abuse, etc. Any platform that you would consider should have security features in place that prevent gaming of the voting functionality, for example, to ensure integrity of the system around voting and ranking. Crowd sourcing best practices There are a number of Crowd sourcing best practices, whether for open innovation or citizen engagement that should be considered as a way to reduce risk for your organization. Since these endeavors require commitment to execute successfully, there are a few questions youll want to answer and research youll want to do as a starting point.In conclusion, asking whether Crowd sourcing is right for you after evaluating the risks and benefits is the natural question. You need to think about the main objective and ask if Crowd sourcing is right for your organization. Here are some questions youll want to give some thought to:

Is your organization culturally open to input from outside there is no sense going down the Crowd sourcing or open innovation path if your team is closed minded or will feel threatened?

Do you have the resources to investigate the ideas and innovation that come from the Crowd sourcing process?

Does the presence, or not, of a reward for the winning idea change things? What is the risk associated with this?

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Do you want to use internal development resources to create something from scatch or use an existing platform? If you choose to use a platform that exists, have you considered the criteria you might use to evaluate Crowd sourcing platforms to make sure they contain the functionality you require?

Crowd sourcing risks shouldnt get in the way of enabling open innovation or citizen engagement at your organization. Using your crowd to solve problems is a great way to make your crowd feel included and empowered, helping boost brand loyalty. Crowd sourcing risks cannot go ignored, as wrong turns can have a negative impact on the success of your Crowd sourcing or crowdfunding project. Case study: It's only appropriate George Harrison is crooning What is Life as I enter RanjivRamchandani's office. He is nuts about the edifying sounds of the sixties and seventies and has carried that devotion to Tantra, the iconic T-shirt brand he founded nearly 15 years back. One of Tantra's most popular T-shirts is one with an image of a godly Jimi Hendrix accompanied by the notorious words 'Are You Experienced?' A team of nearly 10-15 designers and copywriters, many of whom Ramchandani's friends from his advertising days, has created most of Tantra's designs including this one, and he does not see that changing. About 80 per cent of our designs still come from them. We can't rely on Crowd sourcing because most of those designs are amateurish, says Ramchandani. Crowd sourcing, as the name indicates, is the concept of tapping into a large group of people, aided by the internet, to source ideas or funding or solutions to problems. AnckurPatodia, managing director, GTN Enterprises, which owns the Chimp brand of merchandise, could not agree more with Ramchandani, adding, The design has to have an aesthetic which is missing. Here a lot of people just copy existing designs and send them off as their own.

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Chimp sells T-shirts, bags, mugs, notebooks and bags through its own website, kiosks and multi-brand outlets. All of Chimp's designs are made by three professional designers who have worked on the brand on a freelance basis since its inception in 2008. Most of these brands have figured nothing works as well as humour and hence their merchandise tend to, or at least try to, tickle your funny bone. Sample this: the image of a Tamil guy clad in dhoti, with vibhuti on his forehead and a cape on his back and 'Supermaniam' written beneath. With the explosion of websites like Facebook and Twitter, the number of amateur designers sending ideas to these companies has doubled over the last couple of years, some say. But very few of those find their way to the merchandise. Only one of our ten approved designs is crowdsourced. Some people just tweak a dialogue from a film and mail it to us as their slogan, says PranavKapur, co-founder of Blue Bus Tees, which currently turns over Rs 2-3 lakh a month. The concept of Crowd sourcing designs was pioneered by Chicago-based Threadless which invites users to post designs on its website which are then rated by visitors and the winning entry gets $2000 in cash and is put on merchandise. The website gets 8,000 entries a month, according to Jake Nickell, co-founder of Threadless. The model has been replicated by companies across the world, including Mumbai-based Inkfruit, which boasts of 5,000 submissions a month. It offers Rs 5,000-25,000 in prize money and has over 30 product categories. We select about 15-20 designs a month but about 25 per cent of them are from regular winners, says Chief Executive Officer KashyapDalal. Though he adds that all the graphics the firm uses are crowdsourced, one of his competitors, requesting anonymity, says, It's just a marketing tool. Like other firms, they (Inkfruit) have a fixed set of designers who supply most of their ideas. While Dalal refutes that, Patodia notes that unlike Threadless which chooses designs from across the world its Indian counterparts do not have that luxury. Inkfruit raised $3 million from private equity firm SAIF Partners last year. Bhagyshri, founder of SheepStop, a peer of Inkfruit's,

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admits that there are restrictions in the variety of designs she gets: There are a lot of artists but not many of them are good at computerised graphic art. SatishKataria, managing director, Springboard Ventures, partners to Grow VC, a crowdfunding portal, concurs that there are enough good ideas but there is not much awareness about collaborating with people you don't see. Educating users on this is key. KailashIyer, a freelance designer who occasionally submits designs to Threadless and other such sites, opines that most of the bigger crowd-sourcing merchandise sites in India do not have a distinct identity. Their range varies from arbitrary grunge illustrations to photo references to done-to-death slogans. These are designs you'd get at any shop or vendor, so most of the time there's no reason to visit them. Despite offering a cheaper alternative to traditional business models, Crowd sourcing is still in its nascent in India and there is not much reliable data available on it. Besides depending on the user community to vet the authenticity of the designs that are posted on their website, there is no foolproof way of keeping away the knockoffs. The best thing is to be respectful, transparent, accessible and honest yourself, says Nickell in response to Business Today's email queries. He adds that Threadless is a tool for the crowd to express its creativity rather than the crowd being a tool for it to use. While Threadless does not see that many contributions from India, some believe things could change. Earlier you had to rely on foreign brands for cool designs but now we have some international-looking t-shirts being made in India. People's design sense will definitely improve, notes a brand consultant who was earlier heading an advertising agency and who occasionally designs T-shirts for Tantra. Till then, Patodia says, brands like his would be wary of soliciting ideas from the crowd.

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CHAPTER 3
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

A research design is a plan or blueprint of how the research is to be conducted. It reflects the type of study undertaken to provide acceptable answers to the research problem. Research designs are invented to enable the researcher to answer research objectives as validly, objectively, accurately, and economically as possible. Adequately planned and executed design helps greatly in permitting one to rely on both ones observations and inferences. Quantitative research is widely used in both the natural sciences and social sciences, from physics and biology to sociology and journalism. It is also used as a way to research different aspects of education. Qualitative research involves an in-depth understanding of human behavior and the reasons that govern human behavior. The interpretation of research outcomes is subjective, with emphasis placed on the underlying meaning and understanding of phenomena. The benefit of qualitative research is its ability to allow the investigator to gain depth and detail, and to address the how and why questions. Researchers suggest a qualitative approach may yield important insights into the phenomena of mergers and acquisitions. Datta supports the utilisation of a qualitative approach in the study of mergers and acquisitions on the grounds that previous studies in this area provided limited insight as to the reason around half of these transactions have failed. QUALITATIVE VERSUS QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH Presently there are two well-known and recognised traditions associated with empirical research, namely the quantitative paradigm and the qualitative paradigm. The difference between quantitative and qualitative research is based on different research paradigms. According to these authors the quantitative paradigm is based on positivism, which takes scientific explanation n to be homothetic i.e. relating to the
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discovery of universal laws. Its main aims are to measure the social world objectively and to test hypotheses / research objectives i.e. whether the predictive generalization of the theory holds true, based on testing a theory composed of variables, measured with numbers, and analysed with statistical procedures. By contrast, the qualitative paradigm stems from an anti-positivistic, interpretative approach, is holistic in nature and aims at understanding social life and the meaning that people attach to everyday life. Research approached can be qualitative, quantitative or both. The selection of the particular research approach depends on the kind of information required. Qualitative research collects, analyzes, and interprets data that cannot be meaningfully quantified, that is, summarized in the form of numbers. For this reason, qualitative research is sometimes referred to as soft research. Any study using non-structured questioning or observation techniques can be labeled qualitative research. However, qualitative research typically studies relatively few respondents or units. In other words, a study of a large, representative sample would normally not be called qualitative research even if it used some non-structured questions or observations. The non-structured and small-sample features of qualitative research techniques have an important implication. They are intended to provide initial insights, ideas, or understanding about a problem, not to recommend a final course of action. Therefore, qualitative research techniques are most appropriate in situations calling for exploratory research. Quantitative research, in contrast to qualitative research, is characterized by more structure and larger, more representative respondent samples. Consequently, the logical place for quantitative research techniques usually in the form of large-scale questionnaire surveys or structured observations is in conclusive research projects. A primary role of qualitative research is to generate hypotheses that can be tested through more formal research. In contrast, each of the situations under Quantitative Research calls for very specific data, capable of suggesting a final course of action. Qualitative research is one of the two major approaches to research methodology in social sciences. Qualitative research involves an in-depth understanding of human
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behavior and the reasons that govern human behavior. Unlike quantitative research, qualitative research relies on reasons behind various aspects of behavior. Simply put, it investigates the why and how of decision making, as compared to what, where, and when of quantitative research. Hence, the need is for smaller but focused samples rather than large random samples, which qualitative research categorizes data into patterns as the primary basis for organizing and reporting results. Unlike quantitative research, which relies exclusively on the analysis of numerical or quantifiable data, data for qualitative research comes in many mediums, including text, sound, still images, and moving images. Quantitative research is the systematic scientific investigation of properties and phenomena and their relationships. Quantitative research is widely used in both the natural sciences and social sciences, from physics and biology to sociology and journalism. It is also used as a way to research different aspects of education. The objective of quantitative research is to develop and employ mathematical models, theories and hypotheses pertaining to natural phenomena. The process of measurement is central to quantitative research because it provides the fundamental connection between empiricalobservation and mathematical expression of quantitative relationships. The term quantitative research is most often used in the social sciences in contrast to qualitative research. PRIMARY VERSUS SECONDARY DATA Primary data are the original data obtained from a direct observation of the phenomenon under investigation or are collected personally, whilst secondary data are information collected by individuals or organizations other than the researcher. Before the commencement of the actual analysis, where the research objectives will be directly addressed, there is a need to carry out diagnostic procedures. These procedures involve entailing the correct and adieu ate selection of the population and subsequently the sample. The research procedure details support for the manner in which the data was assimilated. The measuring instruments argue the need for the particular questionnaire and the questionnaires validity and reliability as such. Lastly, an outline of all intended statistical procedures will be shown where the theoretical rules of thumb will be indicated. Research data can be collected either in the form of
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secondary or primary or both. In this research both primary and secondary data were collected considering the required information Secondary Data usually factual information can be obtained through secondary data that has already been collected from other sources and is readily available from those sources. The definition and characteristics of secondary data presented above suggest us that secondary data are data that have already been collected for purpose other than the problem in hand. Before detailing as how and what secondary data were collected in this research, in would be worth to examine the advantages and disadvantages of such data. Secondary data are easily accessible, relatively inexpensive, and quickly obtained. Some secondary data are available on topics where it would not be feasible for a firm to collect primary data. Although it is rare for secondary data to provide all the answers to a non-routine research problem, such data can be useful in a variety of ways. Secondary data can help them: Identify the problem, better define the problem, develop an approach to the problem, formulate an appropriate research design, answer certain research questions and test some hypotheses and interpret primary data more insightfully. Because secondary data have been collected for purposes other than the problem at hand, their usefulness to the current problem may be limited in several important ways, including relevance and accuracy. The objectives, nature, and methods used to collect the secondary data may not be appropriate to the present situation.

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CHAPTER 4 ANALYSIS

1:

Crowd sourcing refers to the use of the Internet to generate value from the contributions of a great many people.

160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 yes no

(Fig. 1: Crowd sourcing refers to the use of the Internet to generate value from the
contributions of a great many people)

Out of 200 respondent 144 respondent agree with crowd sourcing refers to the use of the Internet to generate value from the contributions of a great many people. Rest 54 respondent are not agree with crowd sourcing refers to the use of the Internet to generate value from the contributions of a great many people.

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2:

Over the past decade or so, tens of thousands of pioneering individuals have already begun to link together online in radically new cooperative ways.

27%

yes

no 73%

(Fig. 2: Over the past decade or so, tens of thousands of pioneering individuals have already begun to link together online in radically new cooperative ways) Out of 200 respondents 167 respondents say yes to Over the past decade or so, tens of thousands of pioneering individuals have already begun to link together online in radically new cooperative ways and 33 respondents say no to Over the past decade or so, tens of thousands of pioneering individuals have already begun to link together online in radically new cooperative ways.

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3:

Sometimes this has been to develop free or low-cost products and services that are not being delivered by traditional, profit-first business organizations.

no

yes

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

(Fig. 3: Sometimes this has been to develop free or low-cost products and services that are not being delivered by traditional, profit-first business organizations) Out of 200 respondents 174 respondents say yes to Sometimes this has been to develop free or low-cost products and services that are not being delivered by traditional, profit-first business organizations and 26 respondents say no to Sometimes this has been to develop free or low-cost products and services that are not being delivered by traditional, profit-first business organizations.

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4:

In other instances, it has been to help people out, to spread useful information, or to conduct business in new ways.

27%

yes

no

73%

(Fig. 4: In other instances, it has been to help people out, to spread useful information, or to conduct business in new ways) Out of 200 respondents 144 respondents say yes to In other instances, it has been to help people out, to spread useful information, or to conduct business in new ways and 56 respondents say no to In other instances, it has been to help people out, to spread useful information, or to conduct business in new ways.

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5:

All of the above provide examples of how it is now possible for hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of ordinary citizens right around the globe to come together to share and create for the common good.

27%

yes

no

73%

(Fig. 5:All of the above provide examples of how it is now possible for hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of ordinary citizens right around the globe to come together to share and create for the common good) Out of 200 respondents 127 respondents say yes to All of the above provide examples of how it is now possible for hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of ordinary citizens right around the globe to come together to share and create for the common good and 73 respondents say no to All of the above provide examples of how it is now possible for hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of ordinary citizens right around the globe to come together to share and create for the common good.
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6:

In effect, what is happening is that the Internet is starting to be used to interconnect the intelligence of many into a single mind.

160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 yes no

(Fig. 6:In effect, what is happening is that the Internet is starting to be used to interconnect the intelligence of many into a single mind) Out of 200 respondents 164 respondents say yes to In effect, what is happening is that the Internet is starting to be used to interconnect the intelligence of many into a single mind and 36 respondents say no to In effect, what is happening is that the Internet is starting to be used to interconnect the intelligence of many into a single mind.

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7:

Given that we now face so many global challenges, it may also be very fortunate that the Internet is starting to permit intelligence to be pooled in this manner.

no

yes

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

(Fig. 7:Given that we now face so many global challenges, it may also be very fortunate that the Internet is starting to permit intelligence to be pooled in this manner) Out of 200 respondents 102 respondents say yes to Given that we now face so many global challenges, it may also be very fortunate that the Internet is starting to permit intelligence to be pooled in this manner and 98 respondents say no to Given that we now face so many global challenges, it may also be very fortunate that the Internet is starting to permit intelligence to be pooled in this manner. .

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8:

On the other hand, opponents of this evolution warn that not all that glitters is gold and urge not to underestimate the risks inherent in this approach.

27%

yes 73% no

(Fig. 8:On the other hand, opponents of this evolution warn that not all that glitters is gold and urge not to underestimate the risks inherent in this approach) Out of 200 respondents 151 respondents say yes to On the other hand, opponents of this evolution warn that not all that glitters is gold and urge not to underestimate the risks inherent in this approach and 49 respondents say no to On the other hand, opponents of this evolution warn that not all that glitters is gold and urge not to underestimate the risks inherent in this approach.

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9:

The risk that businesses exploit free labour to increase their profits, that qualified professionals are deprived of their source of revenue because they cannot stand the competition of the crowd and, last but not least, that quality standards decline when tasks are carried out by unqualified amateurs without any control.

120 100 80 60 40 20 0 yes no

(Fig. 9:The risk that businesses exploit free labour to increase their profits, that qualified professionals are deprived of their source of revenue because they cannot stand the competition of the crowd and, last but not least, that quality standards decline when tasks are carried out by unqualified amateurs without any control) Out of 200 respondents 75 respondents say yes to The risk that businesses exploit free labour to increase their profits, that qualified professionals are deprived of their source of revenue because they cannot stand the competition of the crowd and, last but not least, that quality standards decline when tasks are carried out by unqualified amateurs without any control. and 125 respondents say no to The risk that businesses exploit
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free labour to increase their profits, that qualified professionals are deprived of their source of revenue because they cannot stand the competition of the crowd and, last but not least, that quality standards decline when tasks are carried out by unqualified amateurs without any control. 10: Furthermore, worries are voiced about the impact of this new approach on society and our way of living more in general, with boundaries between working and leisure time becoming blurred and crowdsourcers spending too many hours on these activities at the expense of their family or social lives.

yes no

(Fig. 10:Furthermore, worries are voiced about the impact of this new approach on society and our way of living more in general, with boundaries between working and leisure time becoming blurred and crowdsourcers spending too many hours on these activities at the expense of their family or social lives)

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Out of 200 respondents 84 respondents say yes to Furthermore, worries are voiced about the impact of this new approach on society and our way of living more in general, with boundaries between working and leisure time becoming blurred and crowdsourcers spending too many hours on these activities at the expense of their family or social lives and 116respondents say no to Furthermore, worries are voiced about the impact of this new approach on society and our way of living more in general, with boundaries between working and leisure time becoming blurred and crowdsourcers spending too many hours on these activities at the expense of their family or social lives. 11: Crowd sourcing is radically transforming translation as we have known it up to now.

no

yes

20

40

60

80

100

120

(Fig. 11:Crowd sourcing is radically transforming translation as we have known it up to now)

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Out of 200 respondents 127 respondents say yes to Crowd sourcing is radically transforming translation as we have known it up to now and 73 respondents say no to Crowd sourcing is radically transforming translation as we have known it up to now.

12:

New applications are appearing every day and all those involved in this activity are faced with new challenges in order to adapt to and keep pace with these evolutions.

yes no

(Fig. 12:New applications are appearing every day and all those involved in this activity are faced with new challenges in order to adapt to and keep pace with these evolutions) New applications are appearing every day and all those involved in this activity are faced with new challenges in order to adapt to and keep pace with these evolutions and 49 respondents say no to New applications are appearing every day and all those involved in this activity are faced with new challenges in order to adapt to and keep pace with these evolutions.

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CHAPTER 5
FINDINGS
Companies under the current proposal will have a lot of exemptions available and be able to raise capital from a larger pool of persons which can include a lot lower thresholds for investor criteria whereas the old rules required that the person be an accredited investor. These people are often recruited from social networks, where the funds can be acquired from an equity purchase, loan, donation, or pre-ordering. The amounts collected have become quite high, with requests that are over a million dollars for software like Trampoline Systems, which used it to finance the commercialization of their new software. This will help you stay organized and keep the Crowd sourcing project on track. For time-sensitive projects, Crowd sourcing can be used to bring large groups of people and information together in a short period of time. Using social media to leverage your Crowd sourcing project allows you to cast a wide net, reaching your crowd to solve a problem/find an answer. Crowd sourcing focuses on small asks, where people often have an easier time of relating to the project or getting their head around it in order to support it to the level they wish. Reaching a wider range of people through Crowd sourcing and social media often means that projects can be funded on time. The Internet offers various mechanisms to perform voting ratings of articles by end-users or computer-driven algorithms that assess popularity via links and page views. Googles search engine is built upon the principle of Crowd Voting. Reality TV shows offer another example of Crowd Voting. Howe calls American Idol the largest focus group ever conducted, Threadless.com uses crowd voting to decide which T-shirts to manufacture and sell on its web site. Consequently,Threadless.com is able to gauge end-consumer demand for new products before making investment decisions on new SKUs. Threadless is
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able to avoid the Power Laws that typically apply to hit-driven industries such as fast-fashion and entertainment. Crowd sourcing is one of those concepts that have competing definitions. On one hand, Crowd sourcing is an engagement method whereby organizations (such as cities, brands and entrepreneurs) seek input from communities of people. These communities can be open or closed, homogenous or

diverse. Participants are invited to contribute ideas, solutions, or support in an open process whereby the elements of creativity, competition and campaigning are reinforced through social media to come up with more powerful ideas or solutions than could be obtained through other means. Ideation is also used to as a term to describe this concept or process. Citizen engagement, open innovation and ideation are terms that are also used. Crowd sourcing can also be defined as the division of labour by a distributed, multi-dimensional workforce, (sometimes paid sometimes volunteer), motivated to accomplish a set of tasks that combined together to achieve an overall goal or solve a problem. This motivation can be financial, reputation building, or part of being a good citizen of a particular community (ie. computer programmer).

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CHAPTER 6
RECOMMENDATION

Talent is only paid for chosen ideas. This means that dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people are working for free in the hope of having their idea chosen. This devalues creative talent enormously.

Other traditional agencies find it hard to compete. Not unlike the Shawshank Redemption, in which the prison inmates could build a railroad for a fraction of the price of a regular business, Crowd sourcing is hard to beat. Does that make it wrong? No. But it does skew the marketplace in favor of freelanceonly business models, which could be very bad news for creative careers.

Wages average out to fall well below average, for the lucky ones who actually have their ideas chosen. Greater probability of failure. Creative departments in the world's top agencies are staffed with the best minds. The talent pool that remains is not comprised of the top-level talent, as 99% of those are employed. Crowdsourcing sacrifices an expensive A-team for a much cheaper B-team.

A breakdown of working relationships. As creatives change on each job, it's tough to build solid relationships with reliable staff. No accountability. With no contracts and low (or no) wages, the creative team will always be on the lookout for the bigger, better deal. When they take it, the agency is left bag.

Crowd sourcing marketing communications such as advertising has received a lot of popular press attention for some brands. Right now I know of many more applications involving product innovation.

This is probably true. In my opinion, some companies made a splash by allowing the public to create new advertisements for their brands.

88

However, most of these campaigns were short lived, and in many cases, the company has not repeated these contests. Like the history of most business buzz words, companies want to be perceived that they are on the leading edge. I believe that Crowd sourcing has potential in some circumstances, but companies need to think how it can be integrated into their usual activities.

The real power of these new tools comes from rethinking normal business processes. Lower costs are often the reason many companies first become interested in Crowd sourcing. Having a voluntary workforce is certainly appealing.

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CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSION

To solve many of the future challenges on the near horizon will demand the collective intelligence and collective action of millions. For most of human history, large numbers of people could only be brought together to work on any form of great undertaking under conditions of dictatorship or mass bureaucracy. But today, with the rise of the Internet, there is now another way. Crowdsourcing refers to the use of the Internet to generate value from the contributions of a great many people. Over the past decade or so, tens of thousands of pioneering individuals have already begun to link together online in radically new cooperative ways. Sometimes this has been to develop free or low-cost products and services that are not being delivered by traditional, profit-first business organizations. In other instances, it has been to help people out, to spread useful information, or to conduct business in new ways. The term Crowd sourcing was coined by Jeff Howe in 2006 to refer to new mechanisms for distributed, online problem solving. For some, Crowd sourcing is purely a term used to refer to new kinds of working arrangement that bring the crowd into outsourcing. However, most people now use the Crowd sourcing term to refer to all situations where things are sourced from the crowd, with collaborative Web 2.0 tools used to prevent too many cooks from spoiling the broth. All of the above provide examples of how it is now possible for hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of ordinary citizens right around the globe to come together to share and create for the common good. In effect, what is happening is that the Internet is starting to be used to interconnect the intelligence of many into a single mind. Given that we now face so many global challenges, it may also be very fortunate that the Internet is starting to permit intelligence to be pooled in this manner.
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The idea behind Crowd sourcing is that the many are smarter and make better choices than the few, and that the crowd has a huge potential for which they often find no outlet. There are more and more people who have knowledge and competences but do not have the chance to use them in their professional lives. Now, Crowd sourcing offers them the opportunity to pursue their interests at amateur level. And indeed, its growing popularity shows that many are willing to provide their skills, time and energy without expecting any financial compensation in return; the possibility of cultivating their interests and passions, and the appreciation and recognition they get for their work are sufficient rewards. Secondly, the explosion of content to be processed and tasks to e carried out is not matched by a similar increase in resources, which, on the contrary, seem set to decrease as a result of the current economic crisis. According to its supporters, Crowd sourcing is the way out of this impasse because it taps a huge reservoir of skills and competences which would be lost otherwise and, in this way, it helps to match needs and resources. The challenge is how to harness and channel the wisdom of the crowd. On the other hand, opponents of this evolution warn that not all that glitters is gold and urge not to underestimate the risks inherent in this approach: the risk that businesses exploit free labour to increase their profits, that qualified professionals are deprived of their source of revenue because they cannot stand the competition of the crowd and, last but not least, that quality standards decline when tasks are carried out by unqualified amateurs without any control. Furthermore, worries are voiced about the impact of this new approach on society and our way of living more in general, with boundaries between working and leisure time becoming blurred and crowdsourcers spending too many hours on these activities at the expense of their family or social lives. This phenomenon has penetrated very diverse fields, ranging from photography to marketing and from science to the non-profit sector notably citizen journalism and humanitarian projects and new applications appear all the time. Regardless of the kind of projects it is applied to, however, the characterizing features of Crowd sourcing tend to be the same: resorting to the crowd to get a work done more rapidly by a large number of people who dispose of the relevant skills and knowledge but
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would not be reachable otherwise; tapping into a wider reservoir which often helps to come up with more 5 efficient and creative responses; creating a strong bond among all those involved, who perceive themselves as a community sharing interests and objectives and are willing to work collaboratively towards a common goal. Among the areas affected by this new way of doing things, translation is worth mentioning. Crowd sourcing is radically transforming translation as we have known it up to now. New applications are appearing every day and all those involved in this activity are faced with new challenges in order to adapt to and keep pace with these evolutions. As happens in other areas, in translation Crowd sourcing is raising not only interest and enthusiasm, but also harsh criticism and serious worries, notably about the adverse effects it has on the prospects and status of professional translators. Gloomy scenarios are sketched according to which the very survival of the category would be at stake, while amateurs dump the prices on the market without being able to guarantee high quality standards. However, Crowd sourcing appears to be well established in our society and set to stay. For this reason it is necessary to try and look into its features and its impacts in detail and with an open mind. This is the objective of this study, which aims at exploring Crowd sourcing in translation, but also at a more general level, to better understand the context where it has developed.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Howe, Jeff (2008), Crowd sourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, New York: Three River Press. Crowdconvention Berlin The future of Crowd sourcing, in Twago Magazine, 16 June 2011. http://antoniogenna.com/2010/09/19/tv-the-big-bang-theory-su-italia-1/ http://the-big-bang-theory.com/ http://www.citzalia.eu/ http://www.Crowd sourcing.org http://duolingo.com/# http://www.ecb.int/euro/coins/comm/html/index.en.html http://ecocn.org/portal.php https://www.facebook.com/?sk=translations http://globalvoicesonline.org/ http://support.google.com/translate/toolkit/?hl=en http://www.harry-auf-deutsch.de/ http://iate.europa.eu http://blog.gts-translation.com/ http://www.ideastorm.com/ http://www.innocentive.com/ http://www.kiva.org/ http://www.kiva.org/about/translati

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ANNEXURE
Questionnaire 1: Crowd sourcing refers to the use of the Internet to generate value from the contributions of a great many people. Yes.. No..

2:

Over the past decade or so, tens of thousands of pioneering individuals have already begun to link together online in radically new cooperative ways. Yes.. No..

3:

Sometimes this has been to develop free or low-cost products and services that are not being delivered by traditional, profit-first business organizations. Yes.. No..

4:

In other instances, it has been to help people out, to spread useful information, or to conduct business in new ways. Yes.. No..

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5:

All of the above provide examples of how it is now possible for hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of ordinary citizens right around the globe to come together to share and create for the common good. Yes.. No..

6:

In effect, what is happening is that the Internet is starting to be used to interconnect the intelligence of many into a single mind. Yes.. No..

7:

Given that we now face so many global challenges, it may also be very fortunate that the Internet is starting to permit intelligence to be pooled in this manner. Yes.. No..

8:

On the other hand, opponents of this evolution warn that not all that glitters is gold and urge not to underestimate the risks inherent in this approach. Yes.. No..

95

9:

The risk that businesses exploit free labour to increase their profits, that qualified professionals are deprived of their source of revenue because they cannot stand the competition of the crowd and, last but not least, that quality standards decline when tasks are carried out by unqualified amateurs without any control. Yes.. No..

10:

Furthermore, worries are voiced about the impact of this new approach on society and our way of living more in general, with boundaries between working and leisure time becoming blurred and crowdsourcers spending too many hours on these activities at the expense of their family or social lives. Yes.. No..

11:

Crowd sourcing is radically transforming translation as we have known it up to now. Yes.. No..

12:

New applications are appearing every day and all those involved in this activity are faced with new challenges in order to adapt to and keep pace with these evolutions. Yes.. No
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Response sheets

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(Sign) Prof. A.B. Raju

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