| Crowdsourcing for the Entrepreneur: Unlocking the Power of Online Communities. Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum. Crowdsourcing, as a method of leveraging the massive pool of online users as resources, has become a viable set of techniques, tools, and marketplaces for organizations and entrepreneurs to drive innovation and generate value. It is applied effectively in a variety of explicit/implicit, and systematic/opportunistic models: collective intelligence (Wikipedia, Yelp, and Twitter analytics); collaborative filtering (Amazon’s product and Netflix’s movie recommendation engines); social tagging (del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Digg); social collaboration (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk); and crowdfunding (disaster relief, political campaigns, micropatronage, startup and non-profit funding, etc.) An entrepreneur can utilize crowdsourcing tools for funding and monetization, task execution, and market analysis; or implement crowdsourcing as a technique for data cleansing and filtering, derived intelligence, etc. However, leveraging crowdsourcing also requires an entrepreneur to navigate a complex landscape of questions. How is it different from outsourcing? Is it truly cost-efficient? What motivates individual contributions? How to grow and sustain an active community? How to ensure quality or service level? What are the legal and political implications? Join us for a program which explores such questions, and the use of crowdsourcing to match specific needs to an available community. See http://entforum.caltech.edu/june2011.html |
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