Crowd Participation Pattern in the Phases of a Product Development Process that Utilizes Crowdsourcing

Abstract

The rise of crowdsourcing and web 2.0 opens plenty of opportunities for companies who want to exploit external sources of ideas for internal innovation. Utilization of crowdsourcing for product design and development has been attracting the attention of both enterprises and researchers. Many cases of implementation of crowdsourcing for product design and development such as: Threadless, FIAT Mio, Lego online Factory, etc., have made crowdsourcing a promising alternative source of innovative power. Although crowdsourcing gained access due to improved Internet access and web 2.0, it is little understood how the crowd, with respect to participation, behaves for any crowdsourcing project. To investigate this, we conducted an experiment on a real crowd of engineering related individuals to figure out the crowd participation pattern for various product design and development phases of a new product development project. The experiment results give a quantitative view of the participation of the crowd (i.e., crowd participation pattern) in various phases of a product design and development process that utilizes crowdsourcing, provide a practical guidance for companies to harness the power of the crowd sensibly, and provide experimental data for further research in this field.