But you know where to rent it. And you'll be only too happy to charge a small fee for making that connection. JL
Dina Medland comments in Forbes:
“Crowdsourcing enables teams and clients to leverage external crowds to access specific, difficult-to-find expertise, collaborate to develop new products or ideas, and even design, build and test new digital assets”
“Collaborative” and “innovation” are the paired buzz words of 2016 – whether around dissenting opinions from the wider stakeholders in business and its investors, wider concerns about climate risk, or anger about corporate governance and pay in the context of a company’s performance and how it meets the needs of society.
So it is not surprising, perhaps, that a consulting firm should come up with a way to help its business clients break through the legacy hierarchical silos of their construct and look for the best ideas, wherever they come from. While doing this, it is also cleverly leveraging the benefits for its own professional services business.
Deloitte Pixel, a worldwide enterprise “crowdsourcing” offering “enables teams and clients to leverage external crowds to access specific, difficult-to-find expertise, collaborate to develop new products or ideas, and even design, build and test new digital assets”, it says.
“Crowdsourcing is not just for start-ups. The crowd can offer enterprises an innovative way to find new solutions to traditional problems while creating opportunities for individuals to change the way they work and learn new skills” said Carl Bates, Deloitte U.K.’s lead partner for crowdsourcing.
We are not aiming to build a crowdsourcing platform, but rather, to grow a ‘crowd of crowds’ which allows us, where appropriate, to take a crowdsourced approach to solving our clients problems” he added.
The rise of the millenial generation, with its values and clearly defined expectations on work and flexibility, the global rise of connectivity among the highly educated, and the very pace of technological and social change have together altered the business world forever, Mr Bates tells me.
“Now we realize that some of the best and the brightest skills will not necessarily want to sit within our organization” he says. But that makes it even more important for Deloitte, as a professional services business, to tap them, and get their input.
Its report on crowdsourcing published in the United Kingdom aimed at helping businesses understand the benefits and challenges involved makes it clear that it already works with an ecosystem of leading crowdsourcing vendors—including Topcoder, 10EQS, Wikistrat and InCrowd—to help create seamless solutions.
Choosing the right crowd for the right problem Source: Deloitte, London May 18, 2016
I ask Mr. Bates what happens when the client (I am thinking banks) is paranoid about confidentiality and “the crowd.” “Great question” he says -but he has the answer.
The reason Deloitte calls it “pixel,” he says, is because you can break down a problem and put it in another context. A banking client needing an algorithm to resolve an issue may be surprised to find that when moved from banking to an energy and resources context it gets a solution via the crowd that works – and no confidences are divulged.
Now that sounds like a long overdue breakthrough in thinking. It could also represent another way of looking at the critical corporate culture of a business, in terms of how it reflects its values and strategic direction, regardless of industry sector.
And it’s a great way to sort out that vexing issue of diversity. “Using the power of the crowd to balance our perspectives is a very powerful mechanism,” says Mr. Bates.
