You are a big or small company and you are confronted with problems like the following: You look for a method of specifically binding DNA, you need urgently a new method for hair root removal or you are desperate to find how to sample leaf tissue**! You do not have the expertise in-house so what do you do? You try to find another company having the solution and make a deal about royalties to use their technology (something that can be quite costly)or you find and hire someone who can find a solution for you, right?
Wrong! You can get tens or hundreds of solutions and choose the best by placing a challenge in the crouwdsourcing site INNOCENTIVE; this will cost you between $ 5.000 to maybe $ 100.000 that is the fee you decide to pay to the one who will find the best solution for you.
Does this work? Just go to the Innocentive site and look for yourself.
This form of crowdsourcing becomes very popular in a fast pace. Next to proprietary crowdsourcing focused on customer creativity an increasing number of Public Crowdsourcing Portals like Innocentive match the supply and demand for very specific technical or non-technical knowledge. Some more examples of this new type of Social Media (I will update my Social Media Strategies model with this new Web 2.0 application soon) are Yet2Come, Innovation Exchange and the Dutch Battle of Concepts targeting creative students that I mentioned in an earlier post.
Is this development good or bad news for professionals? I think both depending how you look to it. I have the idea that this will be soon an issue of more general concern soon. Let's wait and see. *Do not look for this term in Wikipedia, this is a term I thought of it just now!
**All these are real problems of real companies
