Logoworks is one of the largest logo design firms in the world (acquired by HP in May 2007), and has served over 45,000 small businesses since the company was founded in 2001. I had the opportunity to interview Noelle Bates, the company’s Director of Customer Loyalty, about their “peersourcing” business model, the NIH syndrome, and competing crowdsourcing initiatives.

1. In which way is Logoworks active in the field of open innovation and crowdsourcing?

How Logoworks fulfills on design work is not done by crowdsourcing in the typical sense of the word. We actually call what Logoworks does “peersourcing” because the work isn’t done in the form of a purely open call and the work isn’t done by an undefined group. (Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.)

To explain, when Morgan Lynch, the founder of Logoworks, began developing his business plan one of the things he wanted to do was bring multiple graphic designers to a single project but he wanted to make it affordable to the customer. He figured the way to do that was to develop a network of pre-screened freelance designers who picked up the design projects at their leisure. The design community is not an open community, it’s a controlled entity called “Arteis.” Arteis started with just a few designers and as the customer base grew we were able to grow the design community through referrals by designers already in Arteis; that is why we called it “peersourcing” - all of the designers in our community were and still are referred by their peers. These designers, once accepted into Arteis, are able to log in to the Arteis portal to see what projects are available and then sign up for the projects in which they are interested. They know exactly what is required for the project and exactly how much they will be paid for their work before they begin on the project.

2. The Not-Invented-Here (NIH) syndrome is seen as a common obstacle in open innovation processes. Could you give 3 practical tips to change a company’s internal mindset to a culture of Proudly-Found-Elsewhere (PFE)? How are you tackling this issue?

Read the rest of this post >

Interested in Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing? Subscribe to RSS!

A new sub-category as well as three best practice examples have been added to the list of open innovation and crowdsourcing examples. The following three projects were added to the new open source sub-category (under Corporate Initiatives):

1. LEGO Mindstorms - open source robots
2. BurdaStyle - open source sewing
3. GoldCorp - the famous GoldCorp Challenge

Note: It concerns open source initiatives/experiments from established companies, not peer produced open source projects like Open Source Software for example.

The central question is: how can existing companies tap into the creativity and wisdom of the crowd in order to improve the usability, design, and desirability of their products? Contrary to conventional business thinking, the cases of LEGO, BurdaStyle and GoldCorp provide successful examples of how publicly sharing confidential information opens up new opportunities, and in the end, has a positive bottom-line impact on profitability. Have a close look at these 3 examples, and embrace a new way of thinking about sharing information and enabling your customers to participate in your NPD (New Product Development) processes.

With new initiatives being launched every week, it’s difficult to keep track of all projects that are out there. I started to build a list of initiatives for my own use, but perhaps others might find it of interest too. The list of open innovation and crowdsourcing examples is organized in four categories at this moment:

1. Intermediary Platforms & Services
2. Corporate Initiatives
3. Peer Production
4. Public Sector

The goal is not to map every initiative, but to provide an overview of the leading and best practice examples in each niche, from a corporate and entrepreneurial point of view. You can find the current list here: Roadmap to Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing. Which projects should be added, which should be left out? I look forward to your thoughts and suggestions.