Shelley Kuipers, founder and CEO at Chaordix: In the past, large enterprises have expended significant capital on an inefficient group of activities in pursuit of market research, brand insights and innovation. Traditional methods in their service are flawed for a variety of reasons, particularly in their results, where they rarely drive at the scalability and predictability their typical capital investments demand. Notably, a recent Accenture survey indicated that 93 percent of CEOs see innovation as critical to their future success but only 18 percent believe their efforts in service to it are paying off.

When applied with effective methodologies and technology platforms, crowdsourcing communities bring together the ability to address all these areas in an integrated process that delivers an activated, engaged community of brand loyalists and/or employees and, most importantly, actionable predictive insights — all at a considerably lower cost than traditional methods.

Who is buying the services? Who are your typical customers?

It’s a large and expanding group that stretches across industries and, increasingly, multinational enterprises, as crowdsourcing finds wider adoption in the global marketplace. Our key buyers include Innovation Officers, CMOs, and Corporate Communications. The clients themselves are quite diverse. In some cases, they are companies with a strong innovation bent, looking for a more effective way to create and refine product offerings. In others, we deal with clients looking for ways to mobilize a geographically dispersed and diverse workforce, to collectively carve out the future of their organizations. In others still, it’s organizations looking for a way to co-create with their own client bases in pursuit of radical innovation. That’s just the start. There are a variety of other applications but those are three of the most common.

How should enterprises prepare for working with the crowd?

Here are a few lessons we’ve learned with and from our work with clients over the years:

•     Engage an existing crowd if possible (e.g. employees (internal), brand loyalists (external)).
•     Include constraints and expert input in your programming. Crowds can be wise but they’re not all experts.
•     Be forthright about addressing any concerns about crowdsourcing, from data security to legal to IP models and beyond.
•     Make sure your program has mixed methods research (qualitative and quantitative data) outputs.
•     Embrace participation (variety, conversation, reciprocity, collaboration, intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, feedback, creativity) rather than interrogation.

We’re always happy to discuss practical starting points with anyone who is interested.

What competitive advantage does working with you afford enterprises?

There are a number of points worth highlighting because our product and service offering anticipates and addresses the diverse needs that clients require. We offer a fully managed offering of technology, services and expertise. We create compelling participant experiences through a wide variety of crowd-based activities and discussions. We align with and work within client branding guidelines and content. We offer enterprise and social integration. Our platform is responsive, we operate across 15 languages (and counting) and — perhaps most importantly — we are resolutely focused on actionable data and analysis (quantitative and qualitative) for our client-base.

How do you anticipate the crowdsourcing landscape evolving in the coming year? And what changes do you hope to see?

Crowdsourcing is in a very exciting period right now. Next year, we expect the global landscape to fill with a growing density of global companies and enterprises adopting crowdsourcing and engaging with their communities. In concert with that, we expect more and more individual employees and passionate fans of brands to look to engage with the companies that are such huge parts of their lives. Some additional specifics we expect to see:

•     Co-mingling of peer brand crowds
•     Prosumer talent pools
•     Evergreen idea-to-insight applications
•     Expansion of mobile research integration, e.g. quantified self & customer journey apps
•     Funded incentive & sponsorship programs
•     Seed and scale micro-funding competitions for internal R&D budgets
•     Pre-buy innovation communities expand