Geneva’s first crowdsourcing conference took place on May 26th at Uptown Geneva. It was sponsored by the State of Geneva and the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Services of Geneva. Twenty speakers shared their experiences of Crowdsourcing with one hundred participants at the event hosted by Catalyx, in partnership with Crowdsourcing Week. Amongst the presenters were Guy White, Director of Catalyx; Holger Hoffmann-Riem, Innovation Manager at WWF; Andreas Pages, Head of Crowdfunding at Swisscom; and David Simoes-Brown, Co-Founder and Creative Partner at 100open.
For Epi Ludvik Nekaj, Founder and CEO of Crowdsourcing Week, the 5 Ps of the Crowd Economy - people, purpose, platform, participation and productivity - are central to the crowd economy. The 20-minute presentations demonstrated that empowering people in the crowd economy brings many advantages to both the company and the customers.
The crowd is an infinite source of potential to help a company, online and in real time. For Guy White, involving the end user in the project development process motivates groups of people inside and outside of the company to work together without them realizing it. Organizations gain in innovation through creativity. People outside the organization, with their many talents and ideas, contribute to building a better business. Encompassing people’s ideas in the business gives the people a say.
Manuel Grenacher, Founder of Mila and Thomas Standte, Project Manager at Swisscom Friends, launched Swisscom Friends, an on-demand customer support service. It is a crowd-sourced customer service which empowers customers to seek help from each other. With this platform, Swisscom wants to improve customer satisfaction through a personalized service which is on your doorstep.
Moniek Haan, Digital Project Manager Diabetes EMEA at Medtronic presented the value of a P2P (Peer to Peer) approach. Involving the crowd on social media, for example by moderating what patients have to share on Facebook, is an effective way of knowing what they are talking about and what their concerns are. It can also engage people using competitor products and so bring another perspective to Medtronic and its own patient base.
In the final presentation of the day, Holger Hoffmann-Riem from the WWF shared the ideal purpose of his role as a manager in a crowd environment - to make himself redundant in the development process of the project. Encouraging collaboration instead of competition fosters the quality of the projects.
Photo credit : vait_mcright via Pixabay with CCO Public Domain licence
Crowdfunding, I have heard of. This is something which has been around for a while and I guess everyone knows the stories of it being used to launch new video games and that beer cooler which also blends drinks and provides the music!
The questions I would like to ask you is that apart from the examples you give of engaging the public, what other uses has The Crowd been put to? How developed is it here in Switzerland and what's the general feeling for the future of Crowdsourcing? Is it still niche or is it about to go mainstream?
Good news that crowdsourcing is gaining momentum also in Geneva. It's a great idea to engage people in things that interest and/or concern them. I hope this will further dilute the traditional borders between people who produce, consume and finance.
Is it difficult to start one's own project? What should somebody who has an idea but who is not an internet or a social media expert do?