{"id":14307,"date":"2017-06-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-06-28T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/internal-versus-external-crowdsourcing\/"},"modified":"2017-06-28T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-06-28T00:00:00","slug":"internal-versus-external-crowdsourcing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/internal-versus-external-crowdsourcing\/","title":{"rendered":"Internal vs. External Crowdsourcing: How to Determine the Best Solution"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Recently I had a chance to read a terrific article<\/a> in the most recent issue of the MIT\/Sloan Management review about internal crowdsourcing. Co-authored by Lale Kesebi at Planview IdeaPlace customer Li & Fung (watch her awesome presentation at Ignite here to get inspired<\/a>), I recommend it to anyone considering doing ideation with an internal crowd.<\/p>\n

I thought I would spend some time sharing a topic that the article touches on – when is it better to do ideation with an internal crowd versus an external crowd?<\/p>\n

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Let’s start at the beginning and define some terms.<\/p>\n

Ideation terms and definitions<\/span><\/h2>\n

What is an internal crowd?<\/strong> An internal crowd is broadly defined as a group of employees of a company (more than 200 to be a crowd, per Planview IdeaPlace recommendations) that are invited to participate in an ideation challenge or ideation community. The employees can be in multiple departments or divisions.<\/p>\n

What is an external crowd?<\/strong> An external crowd can be a mixed population of people that are not employed by a company hosting the ideation challenge or community. Companies often reach out to customers, partners, consumers (who may or may not be customers) and other specific groups.<\/p>\n

What is an ideation challenge or community?<\/strong> An ideation challenge is a time-bound collaborative multi-step process to solve a specific business challenge, and is powered by ideation management software like Spigit<\/a> to uncover the best ideas by using both crowd input as well as crowd science and machine learning algorithms. An ideation community, however, has no time constraints and the crowd works on broader problem sets, but otherwise follows the same staged process as an ideation challenge. Planview IdeaPlace customers can use Planview IdeaPlace for both or either.<\/p>\n

What kinds of problems\/challenges are better suited for external crowds?<\/strong> On the plus side, external crowds are less involved day-to-day, so bring a fresh perspective to solving problems, and the insight of a customer or potential customer. They are almost by definition less technically immersed than employees in how a company’s products are made and sold. Thus, the best type of challenges for an external crowd are:<\/p>\n