Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: crowdsourcing

  • Crowdsourcing jet engines

    Crowdsourcing jet engines

    Crowdsourcing, harnessing the wisdom of crowds, has been a buzzword for probably the last five years.

    It’s often cited as a way for companies and entrepreneurs to access skills that have been largely unattainable in the past.

    Much of the talk about crowdsourcing has revolved around consumer or marketing projects, say designing logos, and all too often the conversation revolves around getting people to do creative projects for free – the real opportunity though may well lie in the industrial sector tapping into that group wisdom.

    Open innovation and jet engines

    An example of how the industrial sector is using crowdsourcing is GE’s Open Innovation project where the company is offering prizes for the best ideas in developing jet engine parts and advanced 3D printing techniques.

    Like the Kaggle data analysis platform, GE’s project shows that crowdsourcing isn’t just about getting a cheap logo or comparing shoe designs, it can be used to develop high tech equipment.

    Another example of high level crowdsourcing is the DARPA Robotics Challenge where the US military research agency found that enthusiastic amateurs, motivated students and wily entrepreneurs were able to get results that decades of consulting from major defense contractors could achieve as a New Yorker story on Google’s robotic cars describes;

    In one year, they’d made more progress than DARPA’s contractors had in twenty. “You had these crazy people who didn’t know how hard it was,” Thrun told me. “They said, ‘Look, I have a car, I have a computer, and I need a million bucks.’ So they were doing things in their home shops, putting something together that had never been done in robotics before, and some were insanely impressive.” A team of students from Palos Verdes High School in California, led by a seventeen-year-old named Chris Seide, built a self-driving “Doom Buggy” that, Thrun recalls, could change lanes and stop at stop signs. A Ford S.U.V. programmed by some insurance-company employees from Louisiana finished just thirty-seven minutes behind Stanley. Their lead programmer had lifted his preliminary algorithms from textbooks on video-game design.

    The maturing of various technologies like 3D printing, big data and collaboration software are making it easier to democratise and open the innovation process, as DARPA found this can also save costs and accelerate development cycles.

    Balancing crowdsourcing

    GE’s Chief Economist Marco Marco Annunziata sees engineering crowdsourcing as an opportunity to move faster and harness skills even companies as big as his struggle to find, “how much of the innovation process do you keep in house?” He asks.

    That’s a balance many managers are going to consider as they find their markets evolving faster than the capabilities of their own designers and development processes. It may well be that many will find their future innovations come from outside their organisations.

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  • The madness of crowds – ABC Nightlife with Tony Delroy

    The madness of crowds – ABC Nightlife with Tony Delroy

    Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightife across Australia to discuss how technology affects your business and life. For May 2013 we’ll be looking at crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.

    The show will be available on all ABC Local stations and streamed online through the Nightlife website.

    If you missed the show, you can download it from the Nightlife with Tony Delroy webpage.

    Some of the topics we’ll discuss include the following;

    • what is crowdfunding?
    • how does it differ from crowdsourcing?
    • some people say crowdsourcing is a huge cost saver for business, is it?
    • crowdsourcing can be controversial as well, who get upset by it?
    • for creatives like musicians, writers and artists a lot are trying crowdsourcing, how is it going?
    • can crowdsourcing save journalism?
    • what are the ptifalls with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding

    Some crowdsourcing and outsourcing resources we’ll mention include;

    We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

    Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

    You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

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  • Open source manufacturing

    Open source manufacturing

    Chinese business website Caixin Online has a great video on China’s Open Source Hardware Movement, this is an area that promises to change the manufacturing industry.

    Open Source is the philosophy of sharing intellectual property and allowing anyone to improve the idea on the proviso they share their changes with the rest of the world.

    The hope is that open sourced products end up being more reliable than proprietary designs due to scrutiny from hundreds, or thousands, of reviewers.

    Until recently, open source has been largely restricted to the software world but now it’s moving into broader Engineering and manufacturing circles.

    As the Caixin video shows, the open source hardware movement is introducing geeks to a tool which many thought was dead – the soldering iron.

    I noticed this a week or so ago when I walked into a co-working space and found the lady I was meeting hunched over a soldering iron putting together a part for a quadcopter.

    Right now soldering parts to build quadcopters or game controllers is just the beginning, the really interesting things start when open source meets 3D printing – then we’ll see some real game changing things happen.

    Soldering iron picture courtesy of Bomazi through Wikimedia Commons.

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  • Hanging on the telephone

    Hanging on the telephone

    Ever tried to call an online company about a problem? As the New York Times explains, it’s often hard to find the telephone number, let alone someone to answer your call.

    The NY Times article worries a new type of digital divide is appearing between those happy to do business using email or social media and those who who demand to speak to someone.

    In reality, the truth is more subtle than just generational differences – it’s about the web2.0 service-free business model where few, if any, resources are spent on customer support. The idea is the an assistance can be given out on “self service” basis through a website or, better still, crowdsourced on a user forum where the customers work together to figure out solutions themselves.

    For many of the web based cloud computing and social media businesses, this model is essential to their survival. If you were to add a customer support department answering telephones, the viability of the business would collapse.

    While it’s uncertain if that business model is sustainable for many of these web based companies, it’s interesting to ponder how many phone calls most businesses could avoid by having relevant information on their website.

    It’s worthwhile looking at call logs and asking your staff what are the most common questions to your business. Answering those on the company web site might mean happier customers and fewer staff distractions.

    For some businesses, letting customers discuss issues in an online company forum might be a way of crowdsourcing support and giving ideas for future products or service improvements.

    Rather than leaving customers and staff hanging on the phone, having relevant and helpful information on the website saves everybody time and money.

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  • Risks and opportunities in crowdsourcing

    Risks and opportunities in crowdsourcing

    Crowdsourcing and offshoring are changing bringing to small business the same changes we’ve seen in manufacturing and low level office jobs over the last forty years.

    Those trends are going to affect local businesses – particularly the home based service providers – in a serious way as the local web designer and bookkeeper find themselves undercut by freelancers in countries where an Australian day rate is a month’s pay.

    With those thoughts in mind I went along to a round table discussion with crowdsourcing advocate Ross Dawson, Freelancer CEO Matt Barrie and Design Crowd founder Alec Lynch to hear them discuss some of the issues around the concept ahead of their half day workshops in Sydney later this months.

    Having read Ross’ recent book, Getting Results From Crowds, many of the concepts and arguments are familiar but its worthwhile considering how the trend of a globalised workforce is changing.

    The benefits of crowdsourcing services

    Crowdsourcing services like Design Crowd and Freelancer have benefits traditional outsourcing services don’t have.

    Alec Lynch describes these as reduced expense, speed and risk. A broad range of cheap, accessible suppliers mean businesses aren’t locked into costly contracts with the attendant risks while they can bring projects to fruition in days.

    Until recently, globalisation only bought benefits for major corporations with manufacturers contracting work out to China, back office functions to India and software development to Eastern Europe.

    The rise of web based services where smaller, one off projects could be paid for by credit card has bought global outsourcing into the small and medium sized business markets.

    Now local businesses are affected by business practices that, until recently, were the concern of those working for large organisations.

    This is bad news for local service businesses; the suburban web designer or bookkeeper is now finding themselves competing with individuals who, as Matt Barrie points out, have a very good weeks’ income for the equivalent of a day’s pay in Australia.

    Basically the same forces that drove most low value manufacturing offshore are now driving services and white collar jobs the same way.

    Responding to the threat

    There are major downsides for clients using these project based outsourcing services; for instance designing a logo is only part of a much bigger branding exercise which in turn has to be considered against the orgainisation’s longer term objectives.

    Often, most of us don’t know what we don’t know and that’s the real reason why we hire an expert to explain why a logo should look a certain way, an expense should be allocated to one specific cost centre and not another or why we should one software package over another.

    When we outsource our services, particularly to a low cost provider, we lose that expert insight and end up with someone just carrying out a task; it is up to us to supervise something we probably don’t understand ourselves.

    Part of that supervisory role is project management, in the design field managing creatives can be like herding cats. This is why experienced project managers are worth their weight in gold.

    Like many essential skills, project management is one of those which most of us don’t have and is chronically undervalued but when a business is outsourcing to a freelancer in Estonia or Eritrea then this service is essential.

    Providing those skilled supervisor and management roles is where the opportunities lie in a crowdsourced market place.

    In many ways, we’re seeing the end result of the post-industrial society. Just as we offshored the manufacturing industries through the 1970s and 80s then the low skilled office work in the 1990s and 2000s, we’re now outsourcing local services to low cost countries.

    Whether ultimately this is a good thing or not is a big question but for local businesses, the trend is clear and much of the basic work is going offshore. Those who choose to whinge rather than adapt will be left behind.

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