In the past, I have made a fairly simple assessment of patents, and their value. I want to revisit this conversation, because I have continued to think about this for months. What is a patent’s value? Copyright? Copying books used to be the norm. Patents are only valuable in a small number of countries. I pose these questions to our readers because I am conflicted in whether or not there should be these protections in the first place. We are in a new world where technology destroys all barriers, and information is shared freely, openly, and transparently. Information should not be the reason one company succeeds and another fails. It should be the perceived value it gives to its customers, something that directly reflects on a corporation’s operations and management. So I call upon our readers to help me answer these questions. Maybe I’ve lost a couple marbles, or maybe the world is changing directly under our feet.
While there is a lot of buzz about crowdsourcing, there is mainly a great lack of insightful tools to give the concept a meaning and place within existing organizations. As a result, not many companies know what crowdsourcing actually is, let alone they are able to integrate it in their businesses. The IOC-modelTM is a very simple tool that shows how and when crowdsourcing can be relevant by integrating it in your decision-making processes.
In traditional business thinking, there are two viable generic options for performing a certain activity: either you do it In-house, either you Outsource it to a specific party (with levels of collaboration in between). Coase’s theorem provides basic insights in this choice on the level of transaction costs. With the rise of the internet however, transaction costs are lowered furthermore, resulting in a new, third option: Crowdsourcing. In this third option, the task is formulated as an open call towards an undefined, generally large group of people. As such, the IOC-modelTM looks at leveraging the wisdom and skills of the crowd, not necessarily only your customers. Crowdsourcing is bottom-line a new generic option to perform activities/tasks/functions, and should be integrated that way in business decision-making.
How to use this tool? Print-out the figure above, and try to apply it systematically when thinking about activities. For example the design of a new logo: should we do it in-house, outsource it to a specific design agency, or crowdsource it in the form of a challenge like spreadshirt? The content on a new website: are we going to do it in-house, outsource it to freelancers, or crowdsource it like YouTube does for video content? Below, the model is applied to the case of corporate R&D.
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