Summer Entrepreneurial Experiences

The Power of the Crowd

Tuesday, August 15, 2017 10:33 am

Some of you reading this might think that this is so 2005, but it took me until second semester of my sophomore year to figure out how useful crowdsourcing can be. As an entrepreneur, I run into things all the time that I want for my company that I personally don’t have the skill to do. By using crowdsourcing, I can overcome my own limitations and knowledge gaps by relying on the collective intelligence of essentially the whole world on a pay-for-use basis. For example, Hannah and I needed an updated animation video for our Demo Day pitch. Neither one of us can animate things and we were in a time crunch, so we turned to Fiverr and within 48 hours we had the animation that we needed.

Crowdsourcing can take many forms, especially on a college campus, but more often than not it is seen as a compelling approach from an economic viewpoint. It maintains a task-based and project-oriented focus that accommodates the emerging rapid-cycle way of doing business, affording a particular degree of organizational agility. Thereby, it has the capability to fulfill growing demands for fast solutions to startup problems by leveraging the scale of the crowd. Crowds are not bound to a specific company, employer, etc. They are not defined by one specific role or tied to any particular structures. These crowds are energized by intrinsic motivations and driven by their individual desire to learn and explore. These intrinsic motivations can drive better and more efficient outcomes for the sourcing company.

Due to its plug and play nature, crowdsourcing gives entrepreneurs immediate access to enormous crowds of people, qualified to solve their challenges at low costs. At the same time, leveraging the power of the crowd takes advantage of the collective learning and knowledge in a given location that otherwise would not be possible to obtain. Despite benefits, crowdsourcing has limitations and the central risk lies in the expectations of the quality of the delivery. That is also why crowdsourcing is a perfect fit for startups, because it works best for the smaller, independent projects that startups need done.

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