Is Your Organization Truly Benefiting From Thought Leadership and Crowdsourcing?
There are countless examples of how crowdfunding can be extremely effective. However, many business leaders (even those who publicly preach the importance of organizational innovation) fail to take advantage of the equally impactful practice of crowdsourcing. Here’s the thing: if you truly believe that ideas and people are your company’s most valuable resource, then utilizing crowdsourcing is one of the most effective ways of demonstrating that faith in an actionable way.
Here are a few of the most important reasons why you should start implementing crowdsourcing into your business development plan.
1. Expand Your Horizons with More Options to Consider.
The sheer people-power of your entire organization, customers, partners, suppliers and the startup community is sure to outperform what your leadership team alone could come up with. When you have so many people from diverse perspectives and backgrounds contributing ideas, more options will come to the table.
2. Save Costs By Gathering Ideas Organically.
Why only hire a consultant for their expensive and single-minded opinions when you can get a wide variety of perspectives offered simply by asking the right question from the right group of participants? Believe in your own team and community and they will believe in you!
3. Build New Processes From the Ground Up.
Your workforce, customers, and suppliers have the most valuable insights to offer. They are the ones who actually understand how your business processes function and have experienced everything first-hand.
4. Increase Engagement.
There’s nothing more rewarding than realizing that others believe in you — and the opportunity to offer this to your employees, customers, suppliers, and partners (in a truly genuine and impactful way) is not something to be taken lightly. Creating a standardized process of collecting, understanding, and analyzing ideas from your business ecosystem is more just a good way of driving innovation. It is an important way of showing your employees, customers, partners, and suppliers that they (and their insights) are truly valued.
5. Take Advantage of New Tech.
Although crowdsourcing may have represented a significant challenge (and a serious use of company resources) just a few years ago, a slew of new innovation management software solutions has helped to make this insightful process more accessible. To name a few, you can implement the appropriate templates, create out of the box workflows, and even automatize administrative tasks and artificial intelligence. If you like the idea of crowdsourcing but fear that it is not a feasible option for your company, then we highly encourage you to check out our suite of innovation solutions here at Planbox.
6. Create a Company Culture of Innovation.
This is more than coming up with the solution to a problem, it’s about helping your current workforce, customers, partners, and supplier understand their impact on the organization’s evolution. Creating a culture of innovation is one of the best contributions you can make to the present and the future of your organization, and we (Planbox) would love to be part of that process. Visit us online to learn more about how technology can help streamline the process of understanding your business ecosystem and building solutions around the most pressing of needs.