Maximize the Wisdom of the Crowd for Complex Problems
For crowdsourcing to be effective, participants need guidance matched to the type of problem they’re trying to solve.
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Frontiers
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Crowdsourcing can drive innovation, but its success depends on participant guidance and problem complexity. For simple problems, idea-sharing guidance, which encourages people to share and build on one another’s ideas, works best. Complex problems benefit more from integrative solutions generation — prompting people to share detailed knowledge and combine insights to create comprehensive solutions. Research shows that applying this approach to crowdsourcing yields innovative, practical results.
Crowdsourcing is a powerful tool for innovation. All kinds of industries have embraced this approach to collaborative problem-solving to tap into a much wider pool of experiences and perspectives than a few experts could provide.
However, despite its many advantages, crowdsourcing can have disappointing results if not managed properly. A notable example is BP’s crowdsourcing initiative to find solutions that would alleviate the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, one of the largest oil spills in history. Despite receiving 43,000 ideas, BP could not identify a single groundbreaking suggestion that would help mitigate the situation. Proposed solutions were either unworkable or mere modifications of existing solutions.
Crowdsourcing requires careful design, robust quality control mechanisms, and consideration of solutions’ potential pitfalls to deliver on its potential and ensure successful outcomes. Most important, our research has found that the optimal approach to guiding crowds depends on the type of problem a company is trying to solve. Specifically, our results show that crowds can be guided to solve complex problems more successfully and generate more innovative ideas when participants are encouraged to share their knowledge about the problem with others and to build on knowledge others have shared.
Two Instruction Approaches for Guiding the Crowd
We studied two approaches to instructing participants on how to solve a crowdsourcing problem. To understand the methods’ effectiveness, we conducted a field experiment that involved deploying 20 crowdsourcing events for 20 different organizations, from small startups to large companies across a range of industries. The companies that applied the first approach — called idea-sharing guidance — instructed participants to share their own ideas and build on one another’s. This is the approach that has traditionally been used to guide crowdsourcing efforts. The companies that applied the second, novel approach — referred to as integrative solutions generation — instructed participants to share any pertinent knowledge they had about the problem (such as trade-offs, examples, and assumptions) and to combine others’ knowledge with their own to generate comprehensive and integrative solutions rather than just solitary ideas. In each case, the instructions for participants comprised a few sentences that were placed prominently on the crowdsourcing platform, and there was no active moderation of the crowdsourcing process.