One of the most widely regarded standards of crowdsourcing is from Jeff Howe’s book, where it’s said that no company has all of the smartest people working for them. Perhaps; but most companies of any size have an impressive roster of skilled people. That’s how they became successful! And in various ways, companies use crowdsourcing every day to access some of the best technology researchers in the world.
For a variety of reasons, it can sometimes make sense to leverage the internal crowd of a corporation before or instead of looking outward to a public group. While a corporation may not have “all” of the experts in a given field, they likely have a number of them and certainly have a critical mass of experts in their core technologies. In those instances it makes perfect sense to exercise these experts in a crowdsourced research exercise to gain insights, inform decisions, and determine when a public crowdsourcing effort might be warranted.
In addition to the simpler approach of accessing internal corporate resources, corporations also look within for research due to:
A common use case for the internal crowd is a search for evidence of use of a company patent in competitive products. As inventors go through their day-to-day work, they will sometimes come across competing products or technologies that appear to make use of the inventions in a company patent. Having a system in place to capture that information can provide actionable information for the business.
Despite the benefits of internal crowdsourcing, some challenges can still arise, including:
Private crowdsourcing systems can offer a structured approach to collecting information and analyzing input in a controlled environment that prevents users from offering unwanted comments or otherwise contravening corporate policies (something easy to do in email and other general communication platforms). It’s easy to post new requests to the crowd, review the responses and even reward winners. By integrating into the company’s enterprise authentication system, users can leverage existing authentication credentials to make the process of provisioning the system very seamless.
Enterprise crowdsourcing is a valuable business tool. When done properly with purpose built platforms, IP leaders now have access to a high value system for performing technical research and intelligence gathering within their own four walls.
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About Eric Baer
Eric Baer is the Vice President of Product at Article One Partners, a crowdsourced intellectual property research company. He has led development of the AOP crowdsourcing platform since 2009 and worked closely with enterprise customers on private solutions.
Mr. Baer holds a BA in Finance from the University of Iowa and an MBA from the University of Oregon.