As Jade Magnet attempts to take “open innovation” from being an exercise in ideation to an executable design there are multiple things we learn and and our clients learn during the journey.

Two pre-requisites for successful use of crowdsourcing:

- There have to be enough sellers/providers to create useful concepts and deliver solutions. It is a chicken-and-egg story. Finding one good provider ready to work at a low cost is more serendipity than strategy (though Jade Magnet is striving to make that happen for companies that need just that). The real advantage for large corporations is in being able to utilise the “giant brain”(“Wikinomics”, Tapscott & Williams, 2008) of thousands of people combined.

- Mass collaboration should, ideally, not be seen merely as a means of cost reduction – coz that might  not always hold true. Much like outsourcing has transformed from being a cost-benefit-with-operational-challenges to creating a strategic advantage for companies being smart in using it, crowdsourcing will be best utilised if it is aimed at creating a long-term, sustainable advantage.

Once the above are taken care of, open-innovation platforms begin to thrive when they set-up processes that can be used by  consumers to devise products, marketing, supply chain etc. companies would, then, have to focus their energies on channelising the efforts of their consumers rather than invest billions of dollars in research money. As this interactive R&D model shapes up, tactical expenditures promise to go down and those companies which master the consumer-interaction game stand to gain a long-term lead over competition!

Crowdsourcing as a concept has found many subject matter experts comment on the good and bad of the same, especially when it comes to the creative part of it. With any model or concept there’s a positive and a negative attached to it and though there are tons of sites showing why creative crowdsourcing cant work or why it’s not good from different stakeholders perspective, we thought of sharing some good things that the model brings especially for small and medium businesses.

We have seen many startups and SMEs struggling to find the right talent for various reasons – cost, reach, vendor management, project management etc and have really struggled to achieve what they aspired to. Creative crowdsourcing however provides them with an option to reach out to multiple designers and providers at the same time and assess them based on what they design for them rather than what they have done for others.

Havent you shouted this many a times – The designer made exceptionally good designs for others but when it came to my designs he wasnt as good.

Not because the designer wasn’t putting his best but just because when it comes to a subjective matter a good is not good for all and a bad isnt bad for everyone either. Using crowdsourcing model SMBs have been able to see atleast 60-70% of what they would have wanted before going ahead and shortlisting a designer.Surely helps to know how a designer can design for me rather than for another company

How about this – I cant approach agencies as my budget is low and when it comes to freelancers it tough to find the right fit and then i dont have time to manage

With access to a pool of freelancers, smaller agencies on one platform the time to find the right guy to design is significantly reduced, almost by 30% – based on 400+ projects delivered on Jade Magnet since Jan 2010. Also the model allows you to define your budget upfront so that there s no negotiations on what is the right amount for the activity – You decide and let folks who deem it fit pick.

Last few months we have seen SMEs use Jade Magnet to venture into marketing activities which they weren’t doing earlier only because they never had some one to cater to there set of market. There are clients who have been able to increase their revenues significantly using the designs delivered through crowdsourcing and for them the model works brilliantly.

Jade Magnet is proud to sign a Memorandum of Agreement with Nautillus Open Innovation Platform for cooperation in the field of innovation.

Nautillus is an open innovation platform in Central Europe and aims at transfer of technologies and knowledge performed in the field of open innovation.  The agreement will provide additional opportunities to Jade Magnet providers to participate in the shared projects which fall under the creative/technology area. The MOA will also benefit clients across the globe especially Central Europe get access to talent on Jade Magnet platform through Nautillus.

The agreement will enhance sharing of selected projects and knowledge network to build collaborative environment for development of stakeholders on both the platforms.