Understanding Science 2.0: Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation in the Scientific Method
Bücheler, T. & Sieg, JH. 2011. Understanding Science 2.0: Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation in the Scientific Method. Procedia Computer Science, 7, 327329
Are you able to enumerate two terms that became buzzwords in business during the last few years? Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation describe a form of shared knowledge that is enabled by technologies like the internet. The internet connects people and facilitates the collaboration in the innovation process. This approach is now also being observed in science: its called Citizen Science or Science 2.0.Crowdsourcing is the outsourcing of a research task to a large group of people in the form of an open call. In an Open Innovation model firms use external ideas as well as internal knowledge to improve their technology.
This research tests the relevance of Crowdsourcing to the scientific method and focuses on these two research questions:
(1) Can basic science use the technologies from Crowdsourcing to become more efficient relative to the money spent while saving the quality? (2) Which is the best stimulation for large groups to share ideas and data?
In the paper the approach of research is largely explained, because the authors are looking for partners from other scientific ranges and are searching further input for their research.
Pre-tests proved that the scientists supervising the projects were positively surprised by the utility of the results. The data of more profound research are currently being analyzed and if these results are also found to be useful, this may be a revolutionary change for the scientific world!
What
captivated me most in macrowikinomics is exact what this article focusses on: what
about the payment and employment, about the possibility of everyone gaining
profit from crowdsourcing? In short: how
creating value in a context of mass collaboration?
This article
really gives a distinct overview based on several examples of organisations. To start with, the authors distinguish Cathedral
and Bazaar (software) development (introduced by Eric S. Raymond), which
stands for commercial based development and open source development respectively.
Bazaar development relies on a group of voluntarily developers who set up a
base code or platform for other users. An interesting feature of this kind of development
is that profitability is not given a lot of attention, although monetary
incentives are involved for participation in many crowdsourcing projects.
Furthermore,
the article explains that there are different kinds of collaborative value
creation. On the side of organizations, value can consist of benefits other
than monetary (e.g. collective knowledge on Wikipedia) relying on volunteers
working for free; or value can arise from a business model where participants
are paid for their work by client organizations. Besides this, some commercial organizations
succeed in gaining profit from free crowdsourcing projects, by providing
manuals or technical support for e.g. open source software like Linux. On the side
of the participating crowd there are examples of free labor (Wikipedia), paid
labor (InnoCentive) and inexpensive human labor (Mechanical Turk).
To conclude
I want to mention that innovative collaboration is very useful for organizations
in a way a lot of creative ideas originate and clients only have to pay for
qualitative good work, but it can be very difficult to select the best
submission in a contest or to prevent malicious insertions So theres still a
challenge to cope with this difficulties!
Everybody can help to make Ghent a âsmart cityâ
Have you ever wondered how ICT can make it even more
pleasant to live and study in Ghent?You
may even have some wonderful ideas that can make Ghent a smart city. Well, its possible to do something with your ideas
and to put them into practice.
A study published in April 2011 was the start of a new
project that wants to transform Ghent into a smart city. A few students from
the University of Ghent and research workers of the Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs
launched in collaboration with the city of Ghent the website: www.mijnideevoorgent.be. This
website made it possible for everybody to collaborate and to transfer ideas
through the concept of crowdsourcing.When
the first part of the study was finished, they wrote a paper to reveal the
first results.
In the first part of the paper, the authors introduce
a few key concepts. The most important aspect of the introduction is the term smart city. This concept refers to
cities which are trying to be environmental friendly and trying to be more liveable
by using smart energy, environments, mobility and smart health, education and
living/working. Through the website, the researchers collected a lot
of new ideas to make Ghent more liveable. In the paper, they summarized the
best ideas for smart engagement apps
in the urban context of Ghent. The
participants of the study introduced the idea of a generic tool or platform
that provides all the information you need on any subject in Ghent, for example
culture or mobility.
This study shows us how crowdsourcing and community
engagement can help to make it even more pleasant to live and study in
Ghent.I think that it might be
interesting to investigate if there are more examples of crowdsourcing in
Belgium.
Yasmine De Wulf
Mechant, P.,
De Marez, L., Claeys, L., Criel J. & Verdegem, P. 2011. Crowdsourcing
for smart engagement apps in an urban context: an explorative study. International Association for Media and
Communication Research (IAMCR). July 13-17 2011. 12p.
More than fun and money. Worker Motivation in Crowdsourcing â A study on Mechanical Turk.
Money,
pastime, task autonomy, social contact, ... Have you ever wondered why people
spend time on paid crowdsourcing markets such as Amazon Mechanical Turk? This
was the research question of the study which Nicolas Kaufmann, Thimo Schulze
and Daniel Veit executed in 2011.
The term crowdsourcing was defined by Howe in 2006 as the outsourcing of a function or task
traditionally done by a designated agent to an undefined network of labourers
carried out by a company or a similar institution using a type of open call.
Nowadays they use this term to refer to phenomena such as open innovation,
co-creation and knowledge aggregation.
The study executed by the authors of
this paper focused on the paid
crowdsourcing market Amazon Mechanical Turk. They wanted to determine the
motivation of the people who are active on this crowdsourcing platform. Therefore they built a special model that
combines different existing motivation models like work motivation and
education theory and the Self-Determination Theory.They called this model: the Workers Motivation in Crowdsourcing model.
The authors
posted a task on Mechanical Turk to collect their data. The task called
Scientific survey about Mechanical Turk usage. The task took 10 to 15 minutes
and they paid the respondents $0.30.The
results of the survey showed that a lot of people are motivated by the payment,
this is surprising because the overall wage level on the platform is only
$1.38/h. Furthermore the pastime motivation is only important for occasional
workers. The power workers (the people who spend the most time on the platform)
have more intrinsic motivation such as skill variety and task autonomy.
Yasmine De
Wulf
Kaufmann, N.,
Schulze, T.& Veit D. 2011. More
than fun and money. Worker Motivation in Crowdsourcing A study on Mechanical
Turk. Proceedings of the seventeenth
Americas Conference on Information Systems, Detroit, Michigan, August 4th-7th
2011. 11p.
Innovation with Living Labs: a Conceptualization of Learning from User Experiences
Mahr, D. & Schuurman,
D. 2011. Innovation with Living Labs: a
Conceptualization of Learning from User Experiences. European
Marketing Academy, 40th, Proceedings, 6
The lack of correspondence between
customer needs and product characteristics represents a key reason for
failed innovations. This study researches customer involvement in innovation processes
by the use of Living Labs. It focuses on two
main research questions:
(1) What defines a Living Lab and how does it foster knowledge creation?
(2) What is the impact of customer characteristics on knowledge created
through Living Labs?
The concept of Living Labs is
a process where firms observe customers in their own real-life setting when
they develop solutions to new unprecedented problems and discover new usage
possibilities. The firms learn from those use experiences, generalize the
findings and modify products for new trials.
The advantages and disadvantages as well as the characteristics which
distinguish Living Labs from other research approaches are explained in the
paper.
Also the type of involved
customers determines the success. Lead users dispose of useful knowledge
for the innovation process. They detect needs far before other customers and
they benefit by obtaining a solution to them. Often the role of so-called
defectors unsatisfied users -is
underestimated.
The authors conclude with
proposals of future research opportunitieslike research on the design and use of Living Labs or finding out the importance
of the role of Living Labs in the requirement of customers latent needs. In my
opinion the authors ignore the negative aspect of attracting voluntary
participation. Sarah Inghelbrecht
